Kristine Kathryn Ruschhttp://kriswrites.com
Writer, Editor, Fan GirlMon, 25 Sep 2017 19:00:27 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.2https://i1.wp.com/kriswrites.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/canstockphoto3124547-e1449727759522.jpg?fit=32%2C29Kristine Kathryn Ruschhttp://kriswrites.com
323293267967Free Fiction Monday: Becalmed, Part Onehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/kriswrites/vIQx/~3/mvxJtUb31xI/
http://kriswrites.com/2017/09/25/free-fiction-monday-becalmed-part-one/#respondMon, 25 Sep 2017 19:00:27 +0000http://kriswrites.com/?p=19952Mae, chief linguist on the Ivoire, heads a diplomatic mission to Ukhanda. Her handling of relations with the Quurzod lead to a battle that causes the Ivoire’s anacapa drive to malfunction, stranding the ship in foldspace. Mae can’t remember what she did wrong on the mission: all she knows is that she’s one of the few survivors. If she doesn’t recall it, she won’t be able to prevent another disaster when the Ivoire escapes foldspace. If the Ivoire escapes foldspace. Because what no one talks about—and everyone fears—is that the Ivoire is becalmed…forever.

Part one of “Becalmed,” byHugo Award-winning author Kristine Kathryn Rusch is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook and paperback through various online retailers here. The latest book in the Diving series, The Runabout, was released Sept. 22. Click here for more information and buying options.

Becalmed

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Part 1 of 2

Here’s what they tell you when you want to leave the Fleet:

Stay behind. Don’t get back on the ship, not even to retrieve your things. Have someone bring the important items to you.

Check to see if any of your friends or any members of your family want to leave as well. Don’t force them. For most of us, the ship is and has always been home. Life on a planet—any planet—is different. Very different. So different that some can’t handle it, even if they think they can.

Don’t go to a base. Don’t ask to be dropped off. Stay. Create a new life with the grateful people you’ve saved/helped/rescued.

Become someone else.

They tell us these things before each mission and then again as one is ending. They tell us these things so that we can make the right choice for us, the right choice for the ship. The right choice for everyone.

They do this because they used to forbid us from leaving. We were of the ship, they’d say. We were part of the Fleet. We were specially chosen, specially bred.

We were, they said, able to overcome anything.

But that wasn’t true. Even with ships built for five hundred people, there is no room for one slowly devolving intellect, one emotionally unstable but highly trained individual.

No room for the crazy, the sick, or the absolutely terrified.

The key, however, is finding that person. Figuring out who she is.

And what to do about her.

* * *

It had been a slaughter. Twenty-seven of us, and only three survived.

I am one of the survivors.

And that is all I know.

I sit on the window seat in my living area, staring out the portal. I had asked, back when I got promoted the very first time, to have an apartment on the outer edges of the ship. I’d been told apartments that brushed against the exterior were dangerous, that if the ship sustained serious damage I could lose everything.

But I like looking out the portal—a real portal, not a wall screen, not some kind of entertainment—at space as it is at this moment.

But I do not look into space.

Instead, I have activated a small section of my wall screen. I read and reread the regulations. I translate them into different languages. I have the ship’s computer recite them to me. I have the children’s school programs explain them.

The upshot is the same:

I should leave. I should never have come back to the ship. That was my mistake.

Theirs was to keep me and not ask me to remain planetside.

These errors make me nervous. They make me wonder what will happen next, and that is unusual. The ship thrives on structure. Structure comes from following a schedule, following the rules, following long-established traditions.

Tradition dictates an announcement to the entire crew at the beginning and end of each mission: the always familiar, easily quotable regulations about disembarking at the next stop, about leaving if you can no longer perform your duties.

We should have gotten that announcement as soon as the anacapa drive delivered us to this fold in space. We have been here too long.

Even I know that.

Each ship in the Fleet has an anacapa drive. The drive also works as a cloak, although my former husband objects to that term. If the Ivoire is under attack, the captain activates the anacapa drive, which moves us into foldspace. We stay in foldspace only a moment, then return to our original position seconds or hours later, depending on the manner in which the navigators programmed the anacapa. Sometimes, in a battle, seconds are all you need. The enemy ship moves; we do not. We vanish for a moment. Then we reappear, behind them.

How many people have I sent to them over the years? How smug have I felt when the medics in the gold uniforms take troublesome workers from my linguistic unit?

Now they’ve come for me—four Ship Days after we entered this foldspace, ten Ship Days after I was medivacked from our makeshift headquarters on Ukhanda, nine Ship Days after they asked what the Quurzod had done and I answered, “To my knowledge, nothing at all.”

To my knowledge.

Which is terrifyingly incomplete.

Two men and a woman stand in my doorway. I don’t recognize any of them. Clearly, they were never on the teams that took workers from my section.

The woman is the spokesman. She introduces herself. The name washes over me even though I try to catch it, hang onto it, remember it.

Her spiel isn’t what I expect. I expected the standard: You have the right to refuse treatment. You have the right to remain in your apartment until we reach planetside. You have the right to your own medical professional.

Instead, she says, “You are about to undergo a battery of psychological tests. Some will prove exceedingly difficult and/or uncomfortable. Some are designed to retrieve memories you—or something around you—have blocked. These tests will provide us with the truth as you understand it. They will also show if you still retain what is commonly known of as your sanity. Do you understand?”

Oh, I understand. I should be relieved by this, but I am not. I swallow uncontrollably. I am shaking.

What I want to say, what I’m trying not to say, is that I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to know.

Just charge me and be done with it.

Take me back to Ukhanda and leave me there, like you were supposed to.

Forget I even exist.

“Do you understand?” she asks again.

One of the men stares at me, as if he’s trying to figure out whether or not I can speak. I can speak in fifteen languages, and twenty-three different dialects. I can understand sixty languages, albeit some imperfectly.

I can speak. And I do understand. I just don’t want to admit it.

She starts, “Do you—”

“Yes,” I say, thinking that will end her spiel.

But it doesn’t.

“You will want an advocate,” she says. “That can be a friend, a family member, or a professional. We can provide you with a list of professional advocates or you can contact one on your own.”

I dry swallow again. An advocate? I’d heard this in legal matters, but not in psychological ones.

What did I do on Ukhanda?

Do I know?

Do they?

“Am I in serious trouble?” I ask.

For a moment, the woman’s eyes soften. I sense compassion. But then, I might be searching for it.

Or seeing it where it does not exist.

“Yes,” she says.

“Could it damage my family?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says.

I have left my family out of this so far. I haven’t contacted them since my return. Nor have I allowed any of them to contact me, although they’ve tried. I have shut them out, changed the contact codes, refused to acknowledge them when they’ve been outside my door.

Now I feel a bit of comfort—what I had seen as selfish behavior will benefit them after all.

“I’m not going with you until I have an advocate,” I say.

“Good choice,” she says, and waits while I contact the best advocate we have.

* * *

I have never met my advocate before, but I have followed her work for nearly a decade. Legal matters onboard ship are often petty, but they provide real-time entertainment of a kind that most fictions can’t.

And when the legal matters spill into the Fleet, then the entertainment ratchets up.

Leona Shearing has handled some of the biggest intraFleet controversies, but she keeps her hand in on the smaller cases, mostly, she tells me when she arrives at my apartment, because she likes to remain busy. IntraFleet controversies happen only rarely. Smaller, shipboard cases occur every day.

She acts as if I’m a smaller shipboard case. I don’t disabuse her of this notion, although she is surprised that three medical personnel have come to take me away, not the usual two.

She is a flamboyant woman who wears her hair down. She prefers flowing garments, unusual clothing in the Fleet, where most every department has its own uniform and the uniforms differ only by color. She does not work for the Fleet. She runs her own business. All the advocates have their own businesses, as do some of the tutors scattered across the ships. Specialists on the Sante often work privately as well, and so do many of the restaurateurs on the Brazza.

Still, working for someone other than the Fleet is unusual, and risky. Many do not acknowledge their difference, wearing clothing that suggests a uniform. Leona Shearing accentuates her difference with her clothing and her hair. Her manner, however, is strictly professional.

She interviews me briefly—asking my name, my rank, my position, as if she’s checking to see if I am of sound mind. Then she turns to the three medical personnel, who have not left the room, and asks them why they didn’t just send for me.

“She needs to be escorted,” the woman says.

“You only need two people for that,” Leona says.

“One stays. We have occasion to search the apartment.”

She frowns, then narrows her eyes as she looks at me. “Did you let them in here?”

“No,” I say. “They overrode the codes.”

She stands. “You need to tell me what she’s being accused of.”

“She ran a team of twenty-seven to study the Quurzod,” the woman says. “Only three returned.”

“I assume she’s one of the three who returned,” Leona says.

“Yes,” the woman says.

“The twenty-four are dead?” Leona asks.

“We believe so,” the woman says.

“You don’t know?” Leona asks.

“We have not verified the deaths,” the woman says.

Something whispers across my brain, too fast for me to catch it.

“Are the other two survivors being investigated?” Leona says.

“No,” the woman says.

“Why not?” Leona asks.

The woman looks at me. “She’s the only one who broke away from the group.”

My stomach clenches. I have to will my hands not to form fists. I lean against the portal, unable to look at the strangeness of space.

“So?” Leona says.

“So she’s the only one we found covered in blood,” the woman says.

I bite my lower lip. Technically, they didn’t find me. Technically, I staggered into a nearby village, and the villagers contacted the ship.

Technically, I found them.

“I still don’t see the issue,” Leona asks. “I’m sure you tested the blood. From your tone and her appearance, I’m gathering that it wasn’t all hers.”

“None of it was hers,” the woman says.

I glance at Leona. I expect her to look at me, then get up and nod toward me regretfully, to tell me that I no longer deserve her services. But she doesn’t look in my direction at all.

Instead, she says to the woman, “Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t we at war with the Quurzod?”

“We weren’t then,” the woman says.

“We weren’t friendly,” Leona says. “We were there at the request of the Xenth, to investigate claims of genocide, were we not?”

The woman stiffens. So do I. I don’t remember genocide. I don’t remember going planetside.

I don’t remember anything except the heat, the dry air. The stench of drying blood.

“We weren’t at war yet,” the woman says primly.

“We were in unfriendly territory, trying to change the balance of power,” Leona says. “That’s as close as you can get without declaring hostilities.”

The woman’s mouth thins. The men haven’t moved. It’s as if the conversation is going on in another room.

I try not to look at them. I try not to look at any of them.

“I am not a politician,” the woman says. “I’m not sure at what stage a war becomes a war.”

“Perhaps at the first sign of bloodshed,” Leona says.

“I think that’s too simplistic,” the woman says.

“I thought you weren’t a politician,” Leona says.

They stare at each other. My heart pounds. I’m not sure what my advocate is playing at.

The woman takes a deep breath. “They say she caused the deaths.”

“Who says?” Leona asks, and I hear a new note in her voice. Triumph? Had she been fishing for information? Was that why she goaded the medics?

I shrug one shoulder. I don’t honestly know. I haven’t talked to him. Since I got back, the entire Fleet’s been attacked. We’ve moved, been hit, then moved to foldspace. I suspect the captain’s been busy.

“Are you sure it was him who ordered me back?” I ask.

“Enough,” Leona says. “We can talk all night, but until we have facts, I can’t help you. And I need to know what you want. I know what they want. They want to test you.”

She’s looking at me, and her eyes hold no emotion at all. Only a few people can effectively do that. She’s clearly learned it over the course of her career. She doesn’t know what to think of me, and she doesn’t want me to know that.

She wants me to think she’s on my side.

As if I know what my side is.

“I can block the tests,” she says.

My heart leaps as she says this, but I dry swallow yet again. I am afraid of the tests. I am afraid of what they will reveal. I am afraid of what they won’t reveal.

“Why don’t you study my case,” I say, sounding calm and logical, which I am not, “and then we’ll decide what to do.”

“We need to take her out of the residential wing,” the woman says. “She’s dangerous.”

“We don’t know that,” Leona says.

“We can assume,” the woman says.

Leona turns back to her. Leona’s expression changes, from that flat look she gives me to something akin to anger. Only I’m not sure that emotion is real either.

“From my understanding,” Leona says, “she’s been here for days. If she was going to snap, she would have already. Lock the doors, post a guard, put some kind of monitor on her. But leave her here. You know as well as I do that familiarity provides comfort.”

But the apartment isn’t familiar.

Well, part of it is. The furniture, the mementos that I have brought from previous trips, my bedding, my clothing.

But the view from the portal—it’s unfamiliar, and bound to become more so.

If I don’t have to look outside the ship, I might feel better.

“Do you have portals in the evaluation ward?” I ask the woman.

“Yes,” she says.

So outside lurks here, there, in any place they’d take me.

I let out a shaky sigh. “Then I’ll stay here.”

As if the decision is sane.

As if I am.

As if I would know the difference.

* * *

They all leave me, Leona who is off to do research, the three medical personnel. They’ve posted guards, just like Leona told them to, and they made a point of letting me know. The guards—both big, muscular men—displayed the laser pistols attached to their hips and gave me a stern look.

The warning was clear. If I tried to leave, they’d shoot.

If I tried to leave.

Which I’m not going to do.

Maybe they’re the ones who aren’t thinking. I’m the one who locked myself in my apartment. I’m the one who has hidden from everyone I love.

My twin sister Deirdre has left me increasingly urgent messages, using her technical skills to override the protections I’ve put on my private communications. She is worried, she says. She has heard horrible things, she says. She wants to see me, she says.

Too bad. I don’t want to see her.

I don’t want to see anyone.

Not even Coop.

Jonathon Cooper, our captain. My former husband. He looks like a captain of the Fleet should. He’s tall, broad-shouldered, dark haired, handsome, and oh, so intelligent.

We married young and I was going to have a thousand babies, or maybe the acceptable two. But the babies never happened. Every time I got pregnant, I had to go planetside on some mission or another, and every time, I lost them.

The prenatal unit offered to harbor the fetuses for me, so that my risky job wouldn’t have an impact on my children, but Coop didn’t like the idea. For a man who has attached himself to a machine—loving the Ivoire more than anyone, anything else—he has very old-fashioned views about children. He believes that a child housed in a fetal unit will not have the warmth and compassion, the ability to bond with others, that regular humans do.

He might be right; Lord knows, he’s shown me a lot of studies, all from the Fleet, all from various points in our history, all very scientific.

I know this, but I also know that gestating a child in the woman is no guarantee either. The fetus gets exposed to whatever the woman gets exposed to, and sometimes that exposure is toxic or strange or just plain terrifying.

Dry, dry sand. Heat so extreme that my skin aches. The blood has dried on my skin and it stinks, rotting, even as it’s attached to me. But I cannot get it off. I don’t have the water to drink, let alone any to clean myself. I don’t have—

I stand up. My face feels flushed, my skin tight with dried blood.

I don’t want to remember.

I put my hands on my cheeks. I was thinking about Coop. Coop and the babies that never were, and our perennial argument, and the way that he looks at me, even now, as if I have broken his heart.

We still love each other. But we are no longer in love with each other. If we ever were in love with each other.

I think we were in love with the idea of each other. Coop is a bona fide hero, a man who rushes in when he should hang back, who has saved countless lives, who always puts others first and rarely thinks of himself.

I’m the intellectual, the collected one, the one who thinks before she acts—who thinks in many languages before she acts. Coop has always been intrigued by my skills, my ability to make myself understood, to put myself in the place of another culture, another person, to become someone I’m not, even if only for a few minutes.

There is too much Coop to subsume into another human being, even for a moment. I’m beginning to understand that there is not enough me, and perhaps that’s why I can completely vanish into another perspective, because mine is so fragile, so very frail.

Or is it? Coop always says I have a firm core. He may be right. That may be why I am still here—alive, one of three survivors. But that might also be why I can’t remember, why I feel my brains leaking out of my skull, why my memory skips as if it were a rock skimming a clear mountain lake.

I am standing in the middle of my apartment, back to the portal, in foldspace, guards outside my door, my memory gone. I am here because my former husband still loves me too much to sacrifice me for the good of the ship, even though he makes up other reasons. Ancient regulations versus new regulations. Silly, that. He just can’t abide sending me to the middle of that planet, as the war has heated up, a war we started.

Twenty-four died.

I survived.

Along with two others.

Whom I can’t remember.

Just like I can’t remember what happened to everybody else.

* * *

“Something odd is happening here,” I say to Leona. I’m looking out my portal at foldspace. At least I think it’s foldspace.

I recognize nothing out there, and neither does my computer. When I catch a moment, a moment when I can concentrate, I use my apartment computer, trying to figure out where we are. I have to use the information stored on the computer itself; the ship has cut me off. I can’t get into any systems, even informational ones.

The message system doesn’t even work properly. If I want to send a message to anyone other than the medical evaluation unit or Leona, I have to send it through the approval system. Someone else will listen to my complaints, read my notes, see my anxious face.

She sounds offended by this, which strikes me as strange. I’m not offended. I turn.

She’s sitting at my table, her own portable notebook on her lap. Her dark hair is up, and she’s wearing a formal tunic with matching pants.

“I’m not talking about me,” I say, sweeping a hand toward the portal. “Something odd is happening on the ship. To the ship. I don’t know where we are.”

Her expression freezes as if I’ve said something wrong.

“Is this something you’re not supposed to tell me?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “I forgot, that’s all. You can’t access the news.”

Shipboard news is an outside system. I’ve never really paid attention anyway, except when I need to for my work, and even then, I’m not really watching. I’m listening—not to what’s going on, but to how it’s expressed.

I am the ship’s senior linguist, a position as important as the captain’s in its own way. Strange that I haven’t thought of that since I’ve come back. I haven’t identified myself as a linguist at all. I haven’t missed the interplay of languages, the way that the same sentence in one language can mean something completely different when translated word-for-word into another.

Context, subtext, word origins, emotions, all contained in one little phrase, one little word. The difference between “an” and “the” can alter meaning dramatically.

And it’s my job to know these subtleties in every language I specialize in. It’s my job to understand them in the new languages I encounter. It’s my job to make sure we can all communicate clearly, because the basis of diplomacy isn’t action, it’s words.

Words, words, words.

“You’ve gone pale,” Leona says. “Do you need to sit down?”

“No.” I walk back to the portal. It’s space-black out there—not quite total darkness. The universe has its own light, and it’s lovely, most of the time. But usually you can see the source—the star in the distance, the reflection off clouds protecting a planet’s atmosphere.

I see nothing.

I have seen nothing for days.

I sometimes check my own eyesight to see if the problem is inside my head.

(I’m so afraid it is inside my head.)

“What’s the news?” I ask, even though I’m no longer sure I want to know.

She pauses. I turn. She’s frowning. It’s an expression I didn’t expect to see on her face. She’s not someone who lets her emotions near the surface.

I have a clear sense of how terrified she is, and how unwilling she is to admit it.

Although I can’t tell you why I feel that way. I can’t tell you how I know.

Becalmed. A nautical term, adapted from Earth, in the days before ships sailed the heavens. In those days, ships sailed the waters, the seas, they were called, and being becalmed was dangerous.

Sailing ships had no engines. They were powered by the wind. And when the wind was gone, the ship didn’t move. Sometimes, way out at sea, a becalmed ship wouldn’t move for days, weeks, and the men—it was always men—on board would die.

Some say they died from thirst or lack of food.

But other accounts say that men who were becalmed died because conditions had driven them insane.

“Becalmed,” I repeat, and sink into a nearby chair. My heart rate has increased.

Leona watches me, as if she’s afraid of what the news will do to me.

She should be.

The Fleet adopted the word “becalmed” because it’s the best way to describe being stuck in foldspace. The anacapa malfunctions, and we can’t get back. It has happened throughout our history.

Ships get lost, some because they’re becalmed. What no one knows, what no one can figure out, is if they’re stuck in an alternate universe or in the actual fold of space itself.

If there is an actual fold of space.

We don’t know—at least those of us who are in no real need to know. Coop probably knows. He’s probably doing everything he can.

“Has he sent a distress?” I ask, because I can’t not ask. I have to know, even though I do know. Of course, Coop sent a distress. Of course, he’s run through procedure. Of course, he’s done everything he can do.

“Several,” she says.

“And?”

“No one is responding.” She looks at her well-manicured hand. “Some believe that our comm system is down.”

I’m an expert in the comm system. I have to be. Because if the comm techs are incapacitated, someone from the linguistic staff still has to communicate to others. So my technical training—my mechanical training, to use another old Earth term—is in comm systems. I’m as good (maybe better) than Coop’s chief communications officer.

And no one has called me.

Maybe that’s why I haven’t heard any announcement. Not because Coop couldn’t leave me behind, but because another emergency superseded mine.

Maybe I’m forgotten, a byproduct, something the junior members of the staff must deal with until the regular members have time to think about me.

“I have comm system expertise,” I say, again, because I can’t not say it.

“I know,” Leona says.

But she says no more.

“When did the anacapa malfunction?” I ask.

She looks at me, as if I should remember. I don’t remember.

“We were outgunned,” she says. “The Quurzod were right behind us. They fired as we engaged the anacapa. We suffered a lot of damage, and that’s when they think the drive malfunctioned.”

This does not reassure me, which irritates me. Apparently I’d been hoping for reassurance.

“We don’t know?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “It’s hard to do assessments out here. They want to go to a base, but no base is answering. We have limited equipment, limited supplies. We’re on rations—”

She stops herself.

I stand up again. I’m like a child’s toy—up, down, up, down. I can’t stay still for a moment.

“We don’t need to be on rations,” I say. “We have enough supplies to last years.”

Then it’s my turn to freeze. We have enough supplies to last years if we know where we are. If we know where we’re going. If we know we can get resupplied.

She nods. Just once, as if nodding more than once would be too much acknowledgement, would make us complicit in something.

“They don’t know where we are, do they?” I ask.

She shrugs, but it isn’t a casual gesture. It’s a frustrated gesture.

Shrugs are part of communication. The nuances of shrugs are something I have learned over time.

“They need me,” I say.

“Yes,” she says. “They do.”

But she doesn’t move, and she doesn’t say any more. She’s eloquent in her silences.

They need me, but they haven’t come for me. They believe I can’t help them, because I’m somehow damaged, because I’ve done something wrong.

“Is that why the medical evaluation team came?” I say. “To get me back to work?”

She looks at that manicured hand again. She doesn’t reply. Is that a no? Suddenly, for all my training in subtlety, all I’ve learned about reading gestures, I can’t tell.

Finally, she takes a breath. She was steeling herself to talk with me. She isn’t sure I should hear this, but she’s going to tell me anyway.

“Do you know why the Quurzod came after us so vehemently?” she asks.

“No.” I don’t remember much after staggering into that village, after someone gasped, pulled me aside, touched my caked skin.

I collapsed, and woke up on a bed, hooked up to an IV, liquid applied directly into the veins because I couldn’t drink on my own. I woke up later in the hospital wing on the Ivoire, refreshed, no longer burned, my skin smooth and clean and my mouth no longer dry.

I have no idea how I got there, only that I did.

“The Quurzod came because of you,” she says.

I look at her.

“We lost twenty-four,” she says. “They lost more.”

I cannot move. “How many more?”

She shrugs—oh, so eloquent. Not frustrated this time, but an I-don’t-know shrug, an is-an-exact-number-really-important? shrug. “You tell me.”

I have to force myself to breathe. “You’re saying it’s my fault?”

“I’m not saying anything,” she says.

But she is. Oh, she is.

Because I am responsible for communications, language, diplomacy.

If we went in twenty-seven strong—and we did—that means we went in as a team. A planetside team usually has thirty, but I remember—(do I? Or am I making this up?)—that we lost three because they couldn’t stomach the Quurzod.

Not that the Quurzod are so different from us. We haven’t discovered any aliens in our travels—not true aliens, anyway, not aliens in the way that we define them, as sentient creatures who build and create and form attachments like we do. We’ve found strange creatures and even stranger plants, but nothing like the human race.

Although we have found humans throughout our centuries of travel. Thousands and thousands of humans. Each with different languages, different skills, different levels of development.

But exactly the same—emotional, callous, brilliant, sad—capable of great good and great violence, often within the same culture.

The Quurzod—the Quurzod, oh, I remember the briefings, snatches of the briefings at any rate. They make an art out of violence. They kill and maim and do so with great relish. When they committed genocide against the Xenth, they did so with psychopathic glee—killing children in front of parents, torturing loved ones, experimenting to see what kind of punishment a human body could take before it had enough and simply quit.

The stories distressed my team. Three couldn’t face the Quurzod.

It makes no sense. If I started this, then that was all the more reason to leave me behind. We’re taught from childhood that sacrifices are necessary.

We travel in a fleet of ships 500 strong. We split off for various missions, and sometimes we sacrifice an entire ship if we have to. An individual life—one of at least 500 lives on the Ivoire alone—means less than the mission.

The mission: to provide assistance throughout the known universe. We are the good guys, the rescuers; we are the ones who make the wrongs right. We do what we can, interfere if we must, help when we’re needed.

And when we make mistakes, we make them right.

We don’t run.

It seems like we ran.

“I want to talk to Coop,” I say.

Leona shakes her head. “Not until you can tell us what happened.”

“Then I should let the medical evaluation unit run their tests.”

Her head shaking becomes more pronounced. “You can’t. We need truth here, not legal tricks.”

“Tricks?” I say. “They’ll be using equipment, running diagnostics—”

“Asking you questions, putting memories in your head.” She runs her hand over her notebook. “We’ll wait until your own memories return.”

She looks at the portal, then back at me.

“After all,” she says dismally. “We have time.”

* * *

Sometimes I sleep. The body demands it, and when it can no longer function without sleep, I doze wherever I am.

I have fallen asleep on the divan. I love the divan. I have put it in the center of my living area, where most people have group seating. But I never hold meetings here.

I used to study on it, let words dance around me as I spoke them. They’d turn red if I pronounced something wrong, and they’d vanish if spoken correctly. I loved word dancing. I loved study.

Now I lie on the divan and I stare out the portal at all that nothing, not thinking at all. Words don’t even run through my head. I know I’ve been thinking, but I cannot articulate what the thoughts are.

Yet as I fall asleep, I know I am asleep. I feel the divan beneath me, note that the apartment is a bit too cold, think I should tell the apartment’s system to adjust the heat. Or I should grab a blanket from the bedroom. I should be comfortable.

But I am not. I claw my way through a pile of stinky, sticky flesh. Arms move, legs flop, a head turns toward me, eyes gone. I force myself not to look. I am climbing people and I know that if I don’t I will die.

I jerk awake, shudder, trying to get the images from my head. Leona wants me to remember.

I don’t.

I get up and take a blanket off my bed. Then I stop and look at the wall, the only wall I have decorated.

An old blanket—a quilt, to use the proper term—adds color to the room. Pinks and reds and glorious blues, mixed together in a wedding ring pattern. The quilt has been in my family for generations, given, my mother said, to an ancestor as the Fleet embarked from Earth itself.

I don’t know for certain because I’ve never tested the quilt. I keep it out of harsh light. It’s preservation framed, done by my grandmother, and its beauty should remind us of tradition, of homes we’ll never see again, of family.

I have cousins on other ships in the Fleet, family, some distant in corridors down the way. We are not close. My sister has a daughter, and if I never have children, this quilt will go to her.

I wrap the blanket around myself and walk back to the divan. I recline on it again, look out the portal, see that brightly lit blackness, threatening starshine, but not delivering it.

And—

I’m still climbing. The sunlight beats down on me, the heat nearly unbearable. I’ve been praying for the wind to stop since I got here, but now that it has, I want it back, if only to get rid of the insects and the stench.

I am the only one alive. I do not want to look but I do—faces, eyes especially, eyes glazed over and an odd white. Blood everywhere. I climb, standing on people, and if I look up, I can see an edge to the pit I am in.

I stop, listen, hear only my ragged breathing. If I can hear it, someone else can hear it too. Someone lurking out there. Someone who will—

I can’t do it this way. There is no comfort in this apartment, in these rooms. If this is a memory, then I do not want to be alone with it.

If it is a nightmare, I want it banished.

If it is an example of how I will live from now on, I cannot. I will not. I will die before I continue like this.

I contact Leona. Her face appears on my wall screen, looking concerned. I do not give her time to speak.

I say, “I’m going to have the evaluations.”

And then I sever the link.

* * *

The guards escort me to the medical unit. I’m not used to being escorted. I’m used to leading. But these two men, both bigger than me, walk beside me, brushing against me, making it clear that I’m in their power.

They lead me down one of the main corridors in the ship, so it’s wide enough for people to pass us. Everyone who does averts their eyes, partly because I no longer look like me, and partly because I’m being escorted.

Just because there are five hundred of us on the ship doesn’t mean we all know each other. Some of us apprenticed on other ships. Some of us grew up elsewhere in the Fleet. I met Coop on the Brazza, when we were going to school. That we both ended up on the senior staff of the Ivoire had less to do with our designs than with our abilities, and a gap in leadership at the Ivoire at the time.

Back then I was young enough not to realize that I profited from other people’s failures. I notice now.

Just like I’m being noticed, even though people are looking away. They see a crazed woman, hair down, so distracted she forgot to put on shoes before she told the guards she wanted to go to the medical unit. I’m walking through the cold corridors with bare feet, wearing a knee-length white shirt and matching pants—my comfort clothes—in a place where almost everyone else is in uniform.

The medical evaluation unit is on the fifth level of the medical wing. Everything here is as white as my clothing, with nanobits that keep the walls and floors clean. My bare feet leave footprints that get erased by the nanobits after just a moment. The dirt from the guards’ shoes evaporates as quickly as well.

The staff working in the medical unit must work one week in other parts of the ship. This area is too sterile for good human health, and the medical personnel who do not leave find themselves developing allergies and sensitivities to the most normal things—like skin cells and cooking oils.

I’ve put in time in the medical unit as well—all of the linguists do as part of our training. We program the medical database with medical terms from any new language we’ve learned. We also train the staff to speak the most rudimentary forms of many languages—enough to ask after another person’s health—and to understand the answers.

The guards lead me to the fifth level. There a woman waits for me. She’s not the woman who invaded my apartment. Nor is she anyone I know.

She’s tiny, with raven-black hair, black eyes, and a straight line for a mouth. She extends her hand.

“I’m Jill Bannerman,” she says. “I’ll help you through the evaluation.”

“I can’t do anything until my advocate gets here,” I say. The words come out awkward and ungracious. I’m excellent at being accommodating, at saying the right thing at the right time—or I used to be.

“I know,” Bannerman says. “I’ll get you ready, and then we’ll wait for her. She should be here shortly.”

I don’t know what ready means. It makes me nervous. I shake my head. “I’d like to wait.”

“All right,” she says, as if she expected that. “Sit here. We’ll get started as soon as she arrives.”

She leads me to an orange chair that curves around my body as I sit. I’m so paranoid that I wonder if it’s taking readings from me.

But the Ivoire—the Fleet, actually—has privacy laws. Even if this chair records information off me, no one can use the information without my permission.

Have I given permission by agreeing to the evaluation? I have no idea. I should have checked with Leona first.

That’s what she’ll say.

Jill Bannerman speaks softly to my guards, then she leaves the room. The guards move out of the main area and back outside the doors. I’m alone in a room with half a dozen chairs, with walls that reset themselves, and furniture that changes color every ten minutes. First orange, then red, then mauve, then purple, then blue. I watch the furniture, a bit unnerved by it all.

There is nothing else to watch, no entertainment, no open portals, no other people. Just me and the constantly changing furniture.

I tuck my cold feet underneath my legs and make myself breathe deeply. I want to tap my fingertips on the chair, but someone will read that as nervousness, I’m sure. I don’t know why I’m worried that they will notice—it’s hard to miss, and if the system is recording my vital signs, the nervousness will show in my elevated heart rate, my slightly higher-than-normal blood pressure, and even in my breathing.

The only thing I’m not doing right now is regretting my decision. I’m suddenly quite happy to be out of my apartment. I hadn’t realized how claustrophobic I felt in it, how shut down I had been.

How terrified.

The doors slide open and Leona sweeps in. Her green tunic changes the color scheme in the room. Now the chairs float through forest colors—green, dark green, blue-green, blue. She slides into a chair across from me.

“We can still leave,” she says.

I shake my head.

“We need a consult, and we can’t have it here,” she says.

So I am being monitored. “I’m doing this,” I say.

“You made that clear,” she says. “Now we determine how to do it best for you.”

Whatever that means.

“There’s a privacy room just over there,” she says. “We’re using it.”

I’ve read up on advocacy. She’s not supposed to give me orders. She’s supposed to follow mine. But she’s worried and I’m not strong enough to fight her. Besides, I’m not leaving the medical evaluation unit. I’m just stepping into a private room for a few minutes to consult with my advocate.

I don’t have to take her advice.

She touches the wall and a door slides open. I hadn’t noticed it while I was waiting, distracted (apparently) by the constantly changing furniture.

This room is also white with a black conference table that has grown out of the floor. Two chairs sit side by side. I suppose if more people walk in, more chairs will grow out of their storage spots on the floor.

The overhead lights spotlight the chairs and nearby, coffee brews as if someone set it up for us.

Leona ignores it, but I help myself. As I touch the coffee pot, pastries slide in from the far wall. Pastries and an entire plate of fruit, some of it exotic.

“I thought we’re on rations,” I say to her.

“We are, but maybe the medical wing is exempt.”

The food gets her up and she stacks a plate with strudels and Danishes and things I don’t even have a name for. I grab a banana that looks like it came from one of the hydroponics bays, and something with lots of frosting and raisins.

My stomach actually growls. I’m not sure when the last time I ate was.

We sit down with our food and our coffees, suddenly so civilized.

She picks up one of the Danishes, but doesn’t take a bite. “I know I can’t change your mind, but I want you to know what’s at risk.”

I eat the banana first. It’s green and chewy, not really ripe, almost sour. I don’t care. It feels like the first food I’ve eaten in years, even though it’s not.

“I found out why they brought you back to the ship,” Leona says.

That, of all things, catches my attention. It sounds ominous.

“Why?”

“They need to know what happened planetside. They need to know if it’s our fault.”

A shiver runs down my back. If it’s our fault. Of course it’s our fault. The Fleet meddles. That’s what we do.

“What do the other two survivors say?” I ask.

She doesn’t look at me. Instead she takes a bite of that Danish and eats slowly. I want to push her on this. I want her to tell me everything right now.

But some vestiges of my training remain. I sit and watch, counting silently to myself because it’s the only way I can keep still.

Stillness used to be my best weapon. I could wait for anyone. I could listen forever, and learn, without making a move.

But I seem to have lost that ability. I’m restless now, and time feels like it has sped up. Even though I know it has only taken a moment for her to eat that small bite of pastry, it feels as if she has taken an hour.

“What do they say?” I ask because I can’t wait any longer. So much for stillness.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I haven’t spoken to them directly.”

“But you know,” I press.

She shrugs a shoulder—a sorry-said-all-I-can shrug.

Then she sets the pastry down and wipes her hand on a small napkin. “Look,” she says. “If that mess turns out to be our fault, then you’ll probably be executed. Now do you see why I don’t want you to do this?”

“I need to do this,” I say softly.

“Why?” she asks.

“The memories are coming back. I can’t experience them on my own. It’s better if they all come back at once.”

She stares at me, and then sighs. “I’ll see what I can do,” she says, and leaves.

* * *

I sit in that room for what feels like forever, but really is only about an hour. There is a bathroom next to the service area, and I’m able to use that, but I’m not able to leave the room itself. I pace. I count to ten in fifteen languages. Then in six more. And then I start over because I can’t remember all the languages I just tried.

I’ve just started counting to one hundred when Leona returns.

“Jill Bannerman is outside,” Leona says. “When she comes in here, you tell her what you told me about not being able to cope. Be dramatic. The more threatened you feel the better.”

“I won’t be lying,” I say. “I can’t do this alone.”

Those words are so inadequate. If I close my eyes, I can feel the heat, the blood drying on my skin, the bodies rolling beneath my hands. I can’t sit still with that. I have to move. And the more of it that comes back to me, the more movement I need to make.

“You tell her that,” Leona says. “Make it very clear that this is a medical issue.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Because that gives you legal protection. You’ll be considered a patient, not a criminal. If they had taken you that afternoon when you called me, you’d’ve been a criminal. Just like you would have been if you hadn’t waited for me today. This way, you’ll be able to say anything, do anything, and it won’t come out in a legal proceeding. At least not in detail. The ship’s staff can have an advocate in the room, and he can testify to what you say, but it won’t have the force of your testimony. It can only be used to start an investigation, which they’re already running.”

I stare at her. She thinks I’ve done something wrong. They all seem to think I’ve done something wrong.

Is that why I can’t remember?

“Before you decide,” she says, “this is your last chance to go back to your apartment. You can do this on your own and no one will ever have to know.”

My stomach clenches. “And then what?”

“What do you mean?”

“Will I ever be able to leave my apartment? Will I be able to return to my duties?”

She shakes her head. “You’ll be alive. Isn’t that enough?”

I think about the view from my portal. Stuck in foldspace with nothing to see. The same walls, a different view, if we’re lucky, but the same walls for the rest of my life. No more languages. No more work.

No more friends or family.

Just me. Alive. In my apartment.

Becalmed.

“Send her in,” I say, “and I’ll tell her the truth.”

The truth is that I am terrified of my own mind. The truth is that I’m afraid my memories will kill me. I’m afraid if I never access them, they will kill me, and I’m afraid if I do remember, I can’t live with them.

Somehow I stammer that out to Jill Bannerman and she takes some kind of notes and Leona gets her dispensation or whatever it is and I meet the senior staff’s advocate, a man named Rory Harper, whom I’ve seen before, but I can’t remember in what context.

He’s older, fifties, sixties, silvering hair and a dignity that I don’t like. I don’t want someone like him to see me go through the tests. I don’t want anyone to see me.

But I have no choice.

So I agree to everything, and end up here.

* * *

You never see the whole ship, no matter what ship you’re on. About fifty ships have a specialty. Those ships never go on planetside missions because we don’t want to lose them. I got the last of my education on the Brazza. The Brazza specializes in education, the Santé specializes in medical training, the Eiffel specializes in engineering, and the Seul specializes in officer training, just to name a few.

And even on the Brazza, adventurous and young, I never explored the entire ship. No one did, no one could. There was just too much to see, too much to do.

And here, on the Ivoire, even though I’ve worked in the medical wing, I’ve never seen these rooms.

The testing rooms.

They’re dark and strange, buried deep within the ship. They feel like the very center of the ship, even though they cannot be. The Ivoire, like all of the ships in the Fleet, have a birdlike design—a narrow, curved front, expanding to massive body in the center with wider sections that seem like wings, and a final tail toward the back. This makes the Ivoire sound small, but it is not.

The medical unit is in one of the wider sections, with easy access from several areas of the ship. The unit is several levels down, with a lot of material between it and the exterior, unlike my apartment, which is right on the edge. If an attack destroys a section of the ship, that section mostly will not include the medical unit.

Or these testing facilities.

They seem close, cavelike, and my breath catches as I step inside.

I will be alone in here, with doctors of all kinds, as well as my advocate (Leona) and the ship’s advocate (Harper) observing through the walls. Or through something. I am a bit unclear on the mechanism.

Jill assures me that I will be safe, that the monitors in the floor, the walls, the very room itself, will know when I am too emotional to continue, and will pull me back. I will rest, then, and maybe even receive something to help me into a dreamless sleep.

I do not like this room. I do not like the low light, the dark interior, the cushy floor. I want a portal or a screen or something familiar. Before the door closes, I catch her arm.

“Is there somewhere else to do this?”

She shakes her head. “This room is safe.”

“I don’t like it,” I say. “There’s nothing here.”

She gives me a sad look that I suspect she intended as compassionate. “We need the room to mold around you. Nothing in here can contradict what’s happening inside your mind. That’s probably what’s making you uncomfortable.”

I cannot go inside. I remain in the doorway. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I can’t do this.”

“It will help you.”

I shake my head—or rather, I shake my head even more. I don’t realize until this moment that I’ve been shaking my head all along.

“No,” I say. “I can’t go in this room.”

Somehow Leona has found her way to my side. “If she doesn’t want to go in, she doesn’t have to.”

I step back, run a hand over my hair, check my blouse. I’ve been dressing like a professional ever since I came back, ever since I started my new language, even though I never thought I’d see anyone again. I need the pretense.

I need to think I’ll have a use again.

He comes in, and waits as the door closes behind him.

I’m always startled at how much older he looks. Not that command has aged him, although it has, it’s just that I remember the boy I fell for, the handsome dark-haired boy full of promise, and now that boy has become a man—a powerful man—who stands before me.

He’s wearing his black uniform with silver piping, the everyday uniform, nothing special. He would look normal if it weren’t for his hair. He hasn’t tended to it in days, and it has grown long, brushing his collar, making him seem almost unkempt.

“They say you’re refusing treatment,” he says.

I can’t tell if this visit is compassionate or a ship problem. I can’t tell if he’s here because he’s my former husband and still my friend, or if he’s here because he’s the ship’s captain, or both.

I’m not sure I should be able to tell.

“I went to them for help, but I can’t go in the treatment rooms.” It sounds crazy. I sound crazy. But I’m beginning to come to terms with that. I think I am crazy.

–the bodies pile on top of me. I’m drowning in them, afraid to move, afraid not to move, my head wedged in a slightly angled position. I catch some air, but not much. Enough, apparently, to keep me breathing, even though I feel like I’m being crushed.

I curse and realize that I’m sitting down. Coop is crouched before me.

“What was that?” he asks.

I tear up. I blink, hoping that he won’t notice. “The memories,” I say. Then I take a deep breath, determined to change the subject. “Why are they letting you in here? What if I’m dangerous?”

He smiles. “You’re not?”

“The medical evaluation unit thought I was.”

“They’re wrong,” he says.

“You don’t know that,” I say. “You can’t know that.”

“You got brainwashed in a month planetside? You’ve a firm core, remember? No one can brainwash you. That’s why you’re such a good linguist. You can keep your sense of self while understanding others.”

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

If you recall, the novel first appeared in Asimov’s earlier in the summer. That introduced Boss & crew to a brand new audience, as exemplified by Eric Kimminau writing for Tangent Online:

Engrossing. Detailed. Imaginative. I had never heard of the author’sDiving series before reading this. I should have. It is good. Really good….Amazing character construction, building a plot that riveted me almost from the moment it began. I will now absolutely have to read the preceding titles and I cannot wait to see what will come as a result of The Runabout.

His comments were echoed by Sam Tomaino in SFRevu:

A good thing about this story is that you don’t really have to be familiar with the series to understand what is going on. Rusch skillfully waves in the details you need. It is so good, it will make you want to read the other stories.

There will be more after The Runabout. I turned in the next novel in August. Bits of that novel will appear in Asimov’s as well, along with a stand-alone Diving Universe novella. I’ll let you know about it all when they appear.

For those of you who haven’t read the books and want to start with The Runabout, here’s the back cover matter:

A graveyard of spaceships, abandoned by the mysterious Fleet thousands of years earlier. Boss calls it “the Boneyard.” She needs the ships inside to expand her work for Lost Souls Corporation. Yash Zarlengo thinks the Boneyard will help her discover if the Fleet still exists.

Boss and Yash, while exploring the Boneyard, discover a small ship with a powerful and dangerous problem: the ship’s active anacapa drive.

To escape the Boneyard, Boss must deal with the drive. Which means she’ll have to dive the ship on limited time and under extremely dangerous conditions. And she can’t go alone.

A heart-stopping adventure that continues the award-winning Diving Universe series by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

I hope you pick up the book! I had a blast writing it. I hope you’ll have as much fun reading it.

I’m conducting too many negotiations right now. I discuss them as if they’re easy.

They’re not. They’re stressful and take time.

But I always learn something.

And yesterday, I gained a brand new perspective.

I wrote the following sentence to someone who wanted to take my entire IP in a series for a pittance:

I’ve spent decades developing my IP.

I then proceeded to explain to that person that I controlled my IP and they would not get their grubby paws on it, especially for a few thousand dollars and promises of future money. (Anyone who could read contracts would know that the company didn’t have to pay me the full up front money in a timely fashion if at all, and there would be no future money…to me…because I would have signed it away.)

I’ve spent decades developing my IP.

I have never said that before, nor have I said it so blatantly. It provided me with an incredible and unexpected perspective.

I was trained in traditional publishing, where writers go begging for opportunity. Writers are taught to beg, from professors (let me into your class!) to critique groups (is my writing good enough?) to agents (will you take me on?) to publishers (will you buy my book?).

We’re not trained to value what we’ve built.

I’ve spent decades developing my IP.

That statement is a statement of power. It’s a statement of value. It says I have worked hard. Respect my work and deal with me like a professional.

Imagine if all writers took that attitude into their negotiations for their work. Or into anything they do for their writing.

Writers would become stronger, just by owning what they have done. By valuing what they have achieved.

I know many of you are frowning as you look at that sentence. A few of you don’t know what IP is. IP is intellectual property. Intellectual property has become so important in modern business that companies are buying it up and sitting on it.

What, exactly, is intellectual property?

Well, it’s so important that the State Department of the United States Government has an entire division set aside for protecting U.S. IP around the world. And yes, I just discovered that while conducting a Google search for a great definition of IP. I found similar offices on the websites of the governments of Singapore, Australia, and the United Kingdom, along with the standard wikis and law school definitions.

Intellectual property embodies unique work reflecting someone’s creativity and is all around us, manifested through miracle drugs, computer games, films, and cars. The three main areas of intellectual property law that innovators use to protect their ideas are Trademarks, Patents, and Copyrights.

You should click on that link above, because there’s a nice little piece on why IP matters so much that a department of the US government that is not the copyright or patent office has an entire division devoted to it.

I did that so you could defend your copyrights, so that you know what you’re actually licensing, and so that you’re in tune with how your business actually works. Dean’s doing a great series of posts called The Magic Bakery, in which he discusses why writers should protect copyright as well as how to monetize your copyrights properly.

Dean’s blog is fascinating to me. Because whenever he talks about the value of intellectual property, he gets a huge pushback from writers. Or a somewhat clueless series of questions that mean the writers have no idea what they’re actually working on.

Writers are so used to begging to get attention, that they have no idea how to think of their work as something not just important to them, but as something with lasting value.

The world has changed dramatically in the past several decades with more and more of a company’s value attached not to factories, machines, or hard assets but rather the companies’ ideas, processes, and designs – their intellectual property.

The American economy has moved from a manufacturing economy to one that makes most of its revenue from businesses that monetize their intellectual property. You know, like film studios. Game companies. Damn near every business in Silicon Valley.

While I’ve been writing about the disruption in publishing initially caused by (ahem) someone’s proprietary design (um, Amazon Kindle), I really wasn’t paying attention to the outside world’s acknowledgement of IP. In the past, if I had written I’ve spent decades developing my IP to someone I was negotiating with, they would have responded with a confused “Whaaaaat?”

Now, they understand exactly what I mean.

Writers need to understand it too. Even if your books don’t sell well.

The IP I was dealing with in that negotiation came from a novella I first published more than a decade ago. I’ve written dozens of stories and even more work set in that world since. I am constantly developing, licensing, and honing that IP.

It is an active IP, which means that it continues to grow.

I know, still sounds theoretical, right?

So instead of using Dean’s Magic Bakery analogy, let me give you one of my own.

Imagine this:

You have spent fifteen years owning a brick-and-mortar collectibles store. (I’m basing this analogy on one of our stores.) The store has more than 2,000 square feet of retail space, packed to the brim with collectibles as small as a marble or as large as a Homer Simpson life-size doll. In the back is a warehouse with even more items.

There are hundreds of thousands of collectibles in the front and back of that store, each with its own unique value.

One day, a Hollywood location scout walks in the front door, looks around, and decides that this store is a perfect setting for one scene in an upcoming movie. The scout talks to you, and you agree that they can rent the entire store for two days to shoot that scene.

Then the scout brings you the contract to sign that allows them to shoot in your store.

For a few thousand dollars and permission to shoot for two days, you sign away all ownership and control of that store. Sure, you might continue to work in the store, but any profits you make will go to the movie people. And they can take anything they want out of that store for the lifetime of the store, and use those items as they see fit. In fact, they can move the store to Los Angeles if they want, and bar you from entering the store forever.

As a store owner, you would never do that.

Writers do it all the time.

Wow, they think, I’ll get a movie made out of my book.

Wow, they think, I’ll get a game made out of my book.

Wow, they think, I’ll get a traditional publishing deal and my book will be on the stands everywhere.

And they lose the one thing they have of value. Control of their IP.

Does the writer ever think that they spent years developing that property? Nurturing it? Making it cool enough that someone else comes calling and wants a piece of it?

Nope.

Almost never.

And the agents the writers put in charge of guarding the door to their little shops only ask the movie people/game company/traditional publisher how much up front money the writer will make so the agent can get a fast 15%. Or, as in the case of at least one agent I know, the agent demands that the movie people/game company/traditional publisher give him a piece of the property if the agent lets them in the door.

In other words, the agent takes part of the business, but leaves none for the person they’re supposed to represent.

Which is why I do all this annoying negotiation myself.

I have worked hard to create my IP. I spent years on it. I own it. I control it. You want to use a piece of it for a project of yours? Then treat me with the respect I deserve. Treat me like someone who has created something of value. Treat me like an equal.

]]>http://kriswrites.com/2017/09/20/business-musings-i-spent-decades-developing-my-ip-contractsdealbreakers/feed/1319378http://kriswrites.com/2017/09/20/business-musings-i-spent-decades-developing-my-ip-contractsdealbreakers/Free Fiction Monday: Little Miracleshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/kriswrites/vIQx/~3/7jOEhnuug4M/
http://kriswrites.com/2017/09/18/free-fiction-monday-little-miracles-2/#commentsMon, 18 Sep 2017 19:00:48 +0000http://kriswrites.com/?p=19935As a homicide detective, Frank deals with violent death every day. And his reaction to those deaths kills him by inches. Until his most recent case forces him to take a long, hard look at his emotional state. The murder scene’s only survivor might hold the clues Frank needs to solve the case. It might even hold the key to Frank’s very salvation.

“Little Miracles,” by New York Times bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook through various online retailers here.

Little Miracles

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

We found the cat just as we were about to seal off the house. Its throat had been slit, and its coat was matted with blood. Some instinct made me crouch down to touch it. Its skin was warm, and its body struggled with shallow breaths. Life among the carnage.

I snapped my fingers for the paramedics. They glanced at each other and didn’t move.

“Gentlemen, kindly get your asses over here,” I said.

“But sir, it’s a cat.”

“And it’s still breathing. Get over here.”

They crouched over the cat, placed a bandage over its neck, and did something to ease its breathing. I directed them to the veterinarian down the street, then returned my attention to the bloodbath before me. In the kitchen, a woman’s body, curled in a fetal hug, clutching a knife in what appeared to have been self-defense. In the bedroom, two children, slaughtered. And in the master bathroom, a man collapsed over the bathtub, also dead. In the living room, the TV stand was empty. The door to the empty stereo cabinet in the dining room stood open, and pictures were missing from the walls.

It looked like a desperate act of a startled burglar. But the cat was the clue. Sliced on the way out for the sheer pleasure of the act. Cats don’t bark. They don’t threaten killers. Cats hide from frightening circumstances. The killer flushed the cat and slit its throat just to see the blood.

* * *

Wrote up the preliminary report and went home, washed the blood stink off my skin. It was raining. Felt like it was always raining. Oregon: land of the nonexistent sun.

The house was a mess—dishes in the sink, dirty clothes tumbling out of the closet. No time to clean, not even now, with another crazy on the loose. I opened the fridge, searching for a beer, and heard Delilah’s voice: I don’t know how you can come home and assume you lead a normal life, as if nothing happened to you all day. In the early days, she had liked that, the way I could leave my job behind me. But she never could. She always wanted to know the details, relishing the jargon as if it were a new language. Was there high velocity blood? She would have asked about this case.

All over the house, I would have replied. Especially the bathroom and the kitchen. The man must have gone first, but the woman put up quite a fight.

I would never have told her about the blood’s odd trajectory, indicating that the killer used a sharp weapon, knife perhaps, but not a normal kitchen knife. I would never have trusted her that far.

I closed the refrigerator door without the beer. I never did leave the work at the office. It was always there, one corner of the brain assessing the evidence, searching for the clue that would lead us to the creep of the week. Maybe that was why Delilah left. Maybe her words had always been sarcasm, her questions medicine to draw out the poison.

Grabbed the car keys and let myself out the back door. The car, the only thing she left me, a 1988 Saab, drove itself. I stopped in the slanted parking lot at the vet’s, a place I hadn’t been since her dog nearly died chewing a steak bone. Pulled open the door, stepped into the scent of disinfectant, matted fur, and frightened animals. The woman behind the reception desk didn’t recognize me, which was fine, since I didn’t remember seeing her before.

I flashed my badge. “Some of my paramedics brought a cat in earlier.”

She shuddered delicately. Just once, but enough for me to notice. “What an awful thing to do to an animal,” she said.

You should have seen what happened to the people, I nearly said, but since the paramedics had followed procedure and not said anything, I wouldn’t either. “I was wondering if you folks had ever seen the cat before.”

“I haven’t, but let me check with the doctor.” She got up, a tidy woman in a green dress, her age nearly impossible to determine. I glanced around the room. Empty now, but I had seen it filled with worried people hovering over their animals as if the animals were as precious as children. Something in the back set off the dogs, and one of them howled, followed by another. She returned with the vet, the man I remembered, a big-boned redhead with a touch that even the most skittish animal trusted.

“Doug,” he said, and held out a well-scrubbed hand. I shook it.

“Frank.” We have never socialized, only saw each other in this small building, but the familiarity put me at ease when I hadn’t even realized I was uncomfortable. “Ever see the cat before?”

“No,” the vet said. “And he’s got distinctive markings. I would have remembered.”

“Family named Torgenson, lived just down the block. Ever treat their animals?”

He nodded, looking thoughtful, too polite to ask why Torgenson. “They had a dog, died of old age about a month ago. He always brought the dog in. She was allergic to cats. They both came to put the dog down, and she was a mess by the time they left even though we keep this place as dander-free as modern technology allows.”

The news startled me. The cat had been found beside her.

“He’s awake. Want to see him?”

It took me a moment to realize that the vet was talking about the cat. “Sure,” I said, feeling more than a bit uncomfortable. I’d lived through this scene a number of times in hospitals, seeing the survivor, asking preliminary questions. But I couldn’t ask the cat why he’d been there, what he’d seen.

The vet led me through the narrow hallway into a large room filled with steel tables. In the back, rows of cages lined the walls. Cats, in various stages of distress, stared at me. I didn’t see any dogs, figured they must be kept elsewhere.

The vet showed me a cage on the far side of the wall. A white cat with an orange mustache stared at us through the mesh. His eyes were still wide with the effect of the drug. A gauze bandage had been taped in place around his neck. He saw me and rolled on his back, paws kneading the empty air.

“Amazing, huh?” the vet said. “I’ve never seen such a friendly cat. Especially one drugged and wounded.”

“He’ll live?”

“He probably used up eight of his nine lives, but yeah, he’ll make it.” The vet opened the door, reached in, and scratched the cat’s stomach. “What do you plan to do with him?”

I hadn’t realized I had given the cat any thought. “Take him home,” I said.

* * *

The station was a dingy gray. The walls were made of steel and concrete, built during the Vietnam era when everything had to be bombproof. The ventilation was poor, and the place smelled of old cigarettes, stale coffee, and sweat. My desk was the only spotless one among the detectives, mostly because I shoved everything in drawers. When I arrived the morning after the killings, though, files were piled five inches high on the top.

I sat down and sorted through them. Autopsies, blood analyses, request forms for DNA scans, forensics results, photos of the house’s contents…amazing how much reading could be generated in one night. I pulled out the autopsy reports and the photographs of the crime scene.

All night I had been thinking about the cat. Hell, I even stopped at the grocery store and bought litter, a litter pan, and food dishes. The vet said he would give me food when Rip—that’s what they were calling the little guy—was ready to go home.

But that wasn’t all I was thinking about. I was thinking about the kind of person who would slit a cat’s throat. I was thinking about the woman dead on the kitchen floor. I was thinking about the knife in her hand.

It would have been easy enough for her to surprise her husband in the bathroom. A bit of a struggle and he would be down, then attack the sleeping children. In the kitchen, a quick slash across the throat of a stray cat, and then the final act—a knife to her own gut, enough times to bleed to death.

A domestic tragedy, something I had seen so often that it no longer turned my stomach. The papers would play it up, and the D.A.’s office would look into her life just enough to give her a motive before the case closed completely.

I pulled out the pictures, studied them, realized my theory was wrong. No wounds on Mrs. Torgenson’s chest, face, or neck. All in the back. She had been stabbed in the back, surprised in her own kitchen, knife in hand. Not self-defense as I had earlier thought. Surprised chopping an onion for the family dinner.

And Rip, blood matted on his fur, running down his front as it should in a neck wound, but no pool beneath his body. Blood on his back, his tail, his ears. Someone else’s blood. I picked up the pictures, turned them. Handprints. He had been moved.

I set the photos down, put my face in my hands. Amazing the details I had missed. I used to approach a crime scene as if it were a complete jigsaw puzzle. All the clues were there; I just had to notice them and arrange them in the correct order. That way each detail went into the brain, from the day-old cigarette stub on the driveway to the pattern of the bloodstains on the wall. In those days, I would have seen the onions on the sideboard, noticed her shredded back, commented on the handprints covering Rip.

Ceramic clanged against the metal surface of my desk, and the aroma of fresh coffee hit me. “Breakfast, Frank?”

Denny, one of the few men who have been in the station as long as I have. Fifteen years sounds like a long time, but I could remember the days when we were enthusiastic about our work, when we concentrated on catching the creeps and then having a few brews after a rough day. We hadn’t spent time together in I couldn’t remember how long.

I brought my hands down casually, as if I had been resting my eyes instead of berating myself. He had put a cup of coffee on one of my files. I took it, sipped.

I stared at him, seeing instead the little girl clutching her stuffed bunny, eyes still closed as if she were asleep. Her older sister, eyes wide with terror.

Rip had bothered me more than they had. But Rip had been the anomaly at the crime scene.

“Yeah,” I said.

Denny looked at me strangely. Once he pulled me off a perp who’d been caught molesting a five-year-old girl. The murder case I’d busted my ass working on because I knew the mother had tried to strangle her daughters and I didn’t want her to regain custody of them.

“You okay?” he asked.

“No different than I’ve been.”

He nodded once, as if my comment ended the conversation, and disappeared around the corner to his own desk. When Delilah left, he invited me over for dinner for weeks until it became clear that I would never go. I didn’t want to see him and Sheila, perfect examples of conjugal bliss. I didn’t want to socialize with anyone.

I sighed, pulled out my legal pad. Options: The killer was (1) someone they knew; (2) some sicko creep just starting; (3) some sicko creep with a pattern; (4) a burglar, caught in the act; (5) a family member.

I pushed the list aside, filled out the DNA forms, sent a notice of the killing across the wire to see if anyone else picked up a pattern. Then I read the files, crossed off the family member—since, with the bloodbath, the entire family died—and assigned one of my men to monitor the fences in town. I was preparing a list of interviews when McRooney stopped.

“Frank, my office.”

I set my pen down and followed him through the maze of desks to the only walled-off office in the place. McRooney had a large glass door through which he saw damn near everything. Fake plants hung from the fluorescents, and filing cabinets stood like soldiers behind his desk.

He pulled the blinds on the door.

“Sit,” he said.

I did as I was told. McRooney was an okay guy—political, ambitious, people-savvy. I remember when he was a green kid, puking at the scene of his first murder. Long time ago.

“Hear you missed some things at the Torgenson house.”

“Too damn much,” I said. No use lying to the man. He knew.

“Crime lab boys caught some of it. Forensics more. You’re usually ahead of the game, Frank.”

“I know,” I said.

“You’ve been slipping these past six months. You didn’t take time when the wife left. You need to.”

“When the case is wrapped.”

“Now.” McRooney sat behind his desk, looking like a politician in a thirties movie. “I’m going to reassign. This kind of thing is too important.”

“To trust to a guy who’s screwing up.”

“Your words, Frank.” He pulled out a sheet of paper, stamped it, and slid it toward me. “A leave with pay. As much time as you need. Your heart’s gone.”

I ignored the paper. “I’ll just sit at home and get sloshed. Gimme a week. If I haven’t got the case wrapped by then, I’ll go.”

“It’ll be cold then.”

“If I continue to screw up, you mean?”

“You never used to be so defensive.” He leaned back in his chair. It groaned under his weight.

“I never used to notice my own mistakes, either.” I sighed, adjusted my trouser legs. “I don’t think staying home is the way for me. I got a glimmer in this case, first interest I’ve felt in a while. Let me try.”

He pulled the paper back, looked at it, crumpled it. Missed the hook shot to the garbage can. “Three days. That way we don’t lose too much ground.”

Three days. As if he expected nothing from my work. I stood. I wouldn’t expect much from my work, either. I grabbed the doorknob.

“Frank?”

Stopped, waited, head down, not turning.

“Is she worth all this?”

Friend. The comment of a concerned friend. I let my breath out slowly, feeling truth come with it. “I don’t think it’s her. I think it’s been building for a long time. Her going was just a symptom.”

Not so much as a half-formed fingerprint by five. Neighbors heard nothing. No, the family was quiet, kept to themselves. Dog was loud, but it died months ago.

Called the vet. Rip was doing better. Could go home in a few days. Quite the survivor, huh? A comment I took to mean that the vet had seen the papers, understood what happened to the cat.

A little miracle, I replied as I hung up.

Closed the files, went down to the Steelhead for a beer and a burger. The inside was crowded, but not too, just enough so that I had to take a table instead of a booth. Three screens played the news, and the music blared country-western, unusual for a yuppie bar. Glanced at the menu, glanced at the microbrews being sipped at the tables around me. Three days. And day one nearly gone.

When the waitress showed, I ordered a bacon cheddar burger, fries, and a coffee nudge without the nudge. I’d get more work done with caffeine as the drug of choice.

Woman sat across from me, alone. Blonde, leggy, nail polish and lip gloss. Not usually my type. She smiled, I smiled back, and it felt good. But the burger arrived before I could pick myself up and sit beside her. Then the boyfriend showed, three-piece suit and silk tie, and I leaned back, outclassed.

Not that I was too disappointed. I’d picked up too many women in that bar, both before and after Delilah, never for conversation, always for exercise and sometimes not enough of that. Couldn’t imagine bringing a woman to my place now, with its ancient dishes and unwashed sheets. Guess it had been a long time. I did the laundry just after Delilah left, months ago.

The burger settled me, the coffee buzzed me. I wandered back to the station, half wishing the cat had died so we could have sent his body to the lab to check for prints. Uncharitable thought—remembering the little guy on his back, trusting paws kneading the air, the cat box at the house, waiting. We’d had cats at home, barn cats who sat on my shoulders while I milked the cows at five in the morning. Two cats, both killed one morning when they got loose in the cow pen. I cried until my momma shamed me.

Men don’t cry, she said. They get mad.

Yeah, Momma, I thought. What happens when the anger goes, too, and you’re just a big hulking shell?

She would have no answer for that. I squinted, wondered when we last spoke. Wasn’t even sure if I’d told her Delilah was gone.

Opened the door to the station, stepped into the familiar noise and stink. Place never changed, day to night, always busy, always crazy. Problems everywhere, even in a small city like this one.

Three new files on my desk: fax-sent cases, one from Washington, one from California, one from Utah. Sat down and read. Perp never caught. One scene left a dog, thought to be a stray, throat slit. Another cat, belonged to the neighbors, throat slit. Yet another cat, black, purchased from a pet store, throat slit.

California, skipped Nevada, Utah, skipped Idaho, Washington, and now Oregon. New pattern? Or getting sloppy? Hard to tell with a random crazy.

I put my head on my desk. A random crazy. The worst kind.

Typed up a new report, flagged it for McRooney, and reminded him to notify the FBI. The case was theirs now, not that I couldn’t work on it, too.

On the drive home, found myself wondering what the crazy would think if he knew the cat lived. First survivor. The thought gave me a pang, made me half-swerve to head for the vet’s, then forced myself to continue the drive home. Silly idea. The cat was safe. As if it mattered.

Opened the door, turned on the lights, blared Tchaikovsky on the CD and dug into the dishes. Grunge work for relaxation. Had to get the case out of my mind. The best detecting happened in the subconscious—comparing details, fitting pieces. The subconscious still worked, I knew that. The path to the conscious was blocked. I’d seen everything at the murder site but couldn’t remember it until something jogged me. Not good. Not good at all.

Left the dishes to soak, went into the living room, and flopped on the couch. Closed my eyes and walked through the Torgenson house again.

First thing: stale-death reek of blood, even before we walked through the door. Into the sunken living room, done in modular white, with chrome lamps, decorative books. An unused room. And nothing, except a little mud leading up the stairs. Half-moon pattern. Man’s shoe.

Den. Sloppy with toys, half-read books, another stereo still there. Television cabinet empty, VCR gone. No evidence of a search, of a mess other than the intentional one.

Kitchen. Blood-spattered. Woman on her side, fetal position, knife in her hand. Onions chopped on the sideboard, eggs unbeaten in a mixing bowl, meat burned on the stove. The smell of hamburger mixed with fresh blood. Cat left like a calling card beside the back door. Blood pattern on the carpeted steps—dripping blood, spatters on the rug, not the wall.

Follow the stairs twisting to the second story. No handprints, no marks at all on the white walls. Odd for people with children. Fresh paint?

Blood trail leads to the bathroom. Man doubled over the tub, throat slit, blood pouring down the drain. (Drain cleaned? Something else hiding in there? Some missing evidence?) High-velocity blood patterned on the mirror around the sink and onto the toilet. Why couldn’t he see perp in mirror? Mirror has unusually high placement. Perp too short? Or too quick? With throat slit, man unable to scream. First victim, then. The children might have screamed, at least the second girl. Woman didn’t hear—why?

Back to the kitchen, searching, searching, realized the answer in the dining room, now missing. Stereo probably blaring. How, then, could the children sleep? And why was she cooking?

Onions, hamburger, eggs on the sideboard. She was making breakfast.

Back up stairs. Master bedroom, again in white. King-sized bed, made army style—by him, retired colonel, probably his last act. More decorative books in wall cases. Television propped near headboard. Another VCR, more movies. Didn’t have to look to guess the kind. Television still there, as is VCR. Half-moon footprints leading to the bathroom, mud plus blood leading out. Confirmed: killer stopped here first. Knew the morning routine well enough to avoid the woman, get the man, the children, and finally her in the kitchen, alone and terrified.

Followed prints to the girls’ room. Took the youngest first, nearest the door. Quick slash, throat again, killed her before she could wake. Blood trickles off the bed onto the floor. No prints. Went around to kill her sister. Awake, eyes open, body curled. Sister tried to escape, got caught in the man’s arms, watched him kill her…

Opened my eyes, took a deep sigh, body shaking. Relieved to be in my own living room, Marche Slave repeating over and over on the CD. Picked up the remote and shut the music off, deciding silence was more amendable than the noise.

He arrived early morning, interrupted the routine, just as he had in the other states. They thought he was a nighttime killer, but he wasn’t. He had a set time for attack, and a set plan, and he carried it through. Letting Rip live was no accident. He was trying to get caught. Each set of deaths more dangerous than the last, as if he were searching for the final adrenaline rush, the final opportunity…

I leaned over the couch’s arm, picked up the phone, and ordered the forensics squad to return to the house, check the drain, the prints. Hung up and remembered the details from the other reports. Each place he had taken something large, something different. Microwave from California, computer from Utah, china and silver in Washington. He wasn’t fencing, or even masquerading as a burglar. He was furnishing his home. Souvenirs.

And Rip. Not a calling card, but a clue. A stray dog, a neighbor’s cat. Animals didn’t belong to the perp, but were associated with him, somehow. A job, maybe, that took him into certain neighborhoods at particular times of the morning? Allowed him to travel, and to watch patterns. Not animal welfare. Those were city jobs, stable because they paid well, not likely to take a drifter. Vet? Perhaps, but again, stability was the key. Needing to build a practice, to get good references.

Vet. Finally the light bulb went off. I picked up the phone, called the station again, asked Vinnie to double-check the files. Yes, a vet close to each murdered family.

Thumbed through the phone book, found Doug the vet’s home address, grabbed my coat and shield, and left. Ten o’clock might be too late to go visiting in some neighborhoods, but not in mine.

* * *

Took five minutes after I knocked for him to come to the door. Out of his smock, he looked younger—aided, I think, by his tousled hair. I half-expected a female voice to query, an admonition not to wake the kids. Instead got a shirtless, sleepy man clutching a beer, TV blaring in the background, cats emerging from all parts of the house, and a quiet dog padding its way to the door.

“Frank?” Doug—he didn’t seem like a vet any more to me—ran his hand over his face. “You got a problem? There’s an emergency vet on Walker.”

“Need to talk to you about the Torgenson case. Got a minute?”

“Sure.” Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, pushing back a cat with his foot.

“Come on in.”

The place smelled like home. Unwashed dishes piled in the kitchen, blanket on the couch. He tossed a cat off the recliner, bade me sit, used the remote to shut off the TV. “Sorry about the mess. Wife left a few weeks ago, and I can’t bring myself to clean.”

Vets have lives, too. “It’s been six months for me, and I’ve been thinking about hiring a service.”

“Thing is,” Doug said, settling on the couch, feet propped on the coffee table, “I always thought I did a lot of the chores.”

I nodded. Recognition that my situation was not unique warmed me. “Sorry to bother you so late. Just need a few questions answered. You hire anyone new in the last few months?”

He shook his head. “I haven’t hired anyone for two years. Got college kids cleaning the cages—they’ve been with me since they started school. One’s a junior, the other’ll graduate in spring. My receptionist has been there for nearly two years, and the lab techs since I started.”

The air left me, as a feeling of failure grew. Somehow I’d assumed that his night attendants, cage cleaners, would be the ones. Transient, short-term jobs—

Then felt a flood of relief. If that were true, Rip would have died, the first night.

“Who else comes through?”

He closed his eyes. I liked his concentration. Most folks always wanted to know why I needed the information. “Medical supply people like any doctor’s office, deliveries—”

“Any in the morning?”

“Cat food, sometimes, about once a month. Arrives seven a.m. sharp, and gets annoyed if no one’s at the door to let him in. But he’s not new, either. Been servicing us as long as I can remember.”

“But only once a month?”

“Sometimes not even that. Got quite a route. Heard him brag to Sally—that’s my receptionist. He can cover six states in thirty days if he has to, although he runs Oregon, Nevada, usually, picking up supplies in California as he drives through.”

“Don’t like him much.” No need to make that a question. I could feel the animosity in Doug’s every word.

Doug opened his eyes, looked at me, hand on a black cat that decided to stare at me from his lap. “No, I don’t. He’s odd. Animals don’t like him, but they come because he smells like food. Animals always know.”

Strays. The neighbor’s cat. Food.

“Remember his name?”

Doug gently eased the cat away, got up. “No, but I’ve got his card around here, somewhere, if I can find my wallet.” He walked barefoot over to a desk mounded with open envelopes, pushed them aside, and picked up a leather wallet, thumbed through it, and produced a card. I took it. Black lettering on white.

Jonathan Kivy.

Had him.

* * *

I still sweated it. FBI wanted to make the collar—allowed them to take him anywhere they needed to. They found him in Southern Oregon, TV, VCR, stereo, and paintings in the back of his truck, and radioed, promising to bring him in to me.

All night I’d dreamed about Rip walking up to him, trusting but nervous, hoping that a man who smelled like food would provide him with some. Saw the arm flash down, the quick throat slash, the one-handed bloody carry into the Torgensons’ kitchen, dumped by the door like a single sack of cat food.

Woke up, tears on my cheeks, anger in my gut, repeating it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. Remembered nights like that, Delilah’s arms around me, soothing, dreams of dead children, bodies in the river, perps with guns, and perps with knives. She’d tell me it was over. I knew it would never be over, so all I could do was drown the tears, let the anger serve. Repeating it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, until it didn’t any more.

They showed up about eleven a.m., two men in black suits with regulation haircuts, leading a small man, hands in cuffs. I started shivering, anger running through my body, looking for an escape. One leap across the desk, fingers against his throat, showing him how it felt to be small and helpless and dying…

But I didn’t move. Clasped my hands under my desktop, waited for them to stop. McRooney left his office, watched me. He said he’d abide by my decision.

They brought him to my desk. Stared at his hands, long slender fingers, strong. Pictured Rip in them, then the little girl, gripped by the hair, head pulled back.

It didn’t matter.

But it did.

—throat slashed, one quick movement, her sister screaming—

“He’s yours, if you want him, detective,” Adams, one of the FBI men, said. They had praised me the night before for saving them so much headache.

I looked at the perp’s eyes. Cold, black, reflecting only my face. How close had I gotten to that empty stare?

“Extradite him. Utah. They have a death penalty there, and they’re not afraid to use it. Tell them I’ll cooperate in any way I can.” The words came out angry, so forceful that I almost spat at him.

The perp’s face didn’t change. I didn’t so much care about the death penalty as the trial. Oregon’s prisons were overcrowded, good reason, sometimes, to opt for an insanity defense. I didn’t want the perp’s abusive childhood—if he had one—or an anti-social personality disorder, which he did have, to get in the way of his punishment.

They led him into McRooney’s office to prepare the paperwork, perhaps allow him a phone call. I leaned back, wondering why he did it, and then realized that it didn’t matter. He would have some reason, some crazy rationale, but it would just mask the compulsion. I read a lot on serial killers in the early days. Random crazies, triggered by an unknown mechanism. Human, but not human, threatening us all.

I stood up, staggered, with the force of released emotion. Denny stopped by my desk, concern on his face. “You okay?”

Reached up, found wet cheeks. Odd that the tears would come now. “Fine,” I said.

McRooney had left his office, coming to pat me on the back. I didn’t want him to touch me, didn’t want anyone to touch me just then. I swallowed, made the lump disappear. “I’m going to take that leave,” I said. “Starting now.”

McRooney watched, slight frown on his face. To his credit, he didn’t comment on my appearance. “You deserve it, Frank. We’ll set the details later. Good work on this.”

“Thanks,” I said. Grabbed my jacket, and half-ran from the station, knowing that on the leave I would have to think about my future, too.

Maybe homicide was no longer for me. Maybe being a cop was no longer for me.

The thought sobered the weird elation building in my gut. Doug said I could get Rip today, and I would. Funny. A cat started my emotional lockup, and a cat undid it. Because he was an anomaly, the only living thing I had not trained my emotions to hide from at a crime scene. I remembered him on his back, paws kneading the air. Like a little child. Delilah used to say pets brought out the parenting instinct. Fine. I needed something to mother, to take the attention from myself.

I got in the car, wondering how Rip would like the drive. Wondering if I could clean the house in an afternoon. Wondering if Doug would drop by after work for a brew. A man without a wife, without conjugal bliss. We could complain about women, get royally sloshed, laugh and cry until we were sure the emotions ran both hot and cold.

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

I don’t know about you folks, but I’ve had a heck of a tough year. Nothing super serious, in the scheme of things. Just a lot of sadness piling up, as I lost good friends (too many!), a favorite cat, dealt with illness and emergencies and some other smaller problems. Enough that I feel a bit worn out.

Thank heavens for good books. Those of you who followed my recommended reading list know that I spent a lot of time this year reading books that are pure escapism, many with guaranteed happy endings. My go-to for escapism is either romance or young adult fiction. Not all YA has a guaranteed happy ending, but enough of it does that I feel safe reading the books. (Unlike mystery, in which bad things happen to good people. In a mystery I read just recently, the love interest was brutally murdered midway through the book. Surprise, yes. Welcome surprise, yes, kinda. But I felt a bit battered. He was a great character.)

I know many of you have challenges as well. 2017 has shown its teeth these last few months. I figure you need some escapism too, and at a great price.

WMG Publishing’s Allyson Longueira has put together this Storybundle of YA books. You can get all 11 books for as little as $15. You’ll save at least $60, if not more. (I haven’t bothered with the math.) The centerpiece here is Fiction River: Sparks, edited by Rebecca Moesta. I love this volume. I remember when Rebecca put it together. She insisted on something good, something uplifting, in every single story. The story could start dark, but it had to end in an upbeat way. It needed hope.

The rest of the bundle contains hope as well. Dean contributed The Life and Times of Buffalo Jimmy. This book shows his deep love and respect for the West. He wrote a historical western, featuring young men who find themselves crossing the continent alone. I read all of Dean’s work first, and this is one of my very favorites.

Dave Hendrickson’s Offside received tons of accolades and has been taught in a high school. Dave, who has an impressive sports journalism resume, wrote a historical novel about racism and football in 1967. Dave doesn’t flinch from the dark history, but he does show us light in the darkness.

I haven’t read all of the books in the bundle. One of the perks of bundling is that we get copies as well. So I’ll be reading the two books from the two authors whose work is new to me—John Biggs and Melissa McShane. I have read and loved work from every other author in this bundle. Deb Logan, Anthea Sharp, Thomas K. Carpenter, Darcy Pattison, and Jody Lynn Nye have all written stories (or novels) that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed. Jody’s short story collection is brand new, and I suspect I’ll open that one even before the Biggs and McShane.

I contributed the first book in my Interim Fates series. I write goofy paranormal fantasy romance as Kristine Grayson—or I did, until the Interim Fates jumped out and grabbed my imagination. They started as a joke in one of my Grayson romance novels. Their father, Zeus, got made at the real Fates, fired them, and installed his teenage daughters in their place. Those poor girls were way over their heads, and ended up gaining my sympathy. And when all was said and done, the girls opted to go live with their mothers. Their human mothers. No magic until they’re fully adult.

Which is like a backwards fantasy novel. I removed the magic from my magical characters and are sending them to a strange and wonderful place—the real world. Tiffany Tumbles starts the series. This series was so much fun to write. The books just hummed along. If only all books came together that smoothly…

As some of you know, the other neat thing about Storybundle is that you have the option to give to a charity when you buy your books. Allyson chose one of her very favorite charities for this bundle—SMART. SMART, which stands for Start Making A Reader Today, helps bridge the learning gap for kids. The charity doesn’t just help them read; it works to hook them on reading. To find out more about this amazing organization, click this link.

You don’t have to get all 11 books in this bundle to participate. You can get five books for five dollars. And one of those books is Fiction River: Sparks, guaranteed to lift your mood.

As I finished my Kris Nelscott/Smokey Dalton novel, Stone Cribs, I realized that the victim in the book, Valentina Wilson, was one amazing woman. And she needed a story arc all her own. I knew how she was going to end up, and who she would be years after the events in Stone Cribs, but I needed to write the story of how she got to that new place.

I started a novel about her. In fact, I’ve written that novel maybe six times. None of the drafts worked, because I was shoving bits of other novels into the drafts. I finally picked those strands apart, and figured out that I had several novels to write, not just about Val, but about her mentor, Pamela Griffin as well.

When I realized that Pammy was an important character, I got the title for the book introducing her and showing how she mentored Val. That book was titled Defenders. As was every draft thereafter. In fact, the whole series was titled Defenders.

I started this process in 2006. I talked to Dean about the title. We were both aware of the various Marvel Comics series titled The Defenders (and The New Defenders and The Secret Defenders and…and…) but I knew a mystery novel about 1969 wasn’t going to overlap in its marketing with a comic book series that had published intermittently. Even though there was a short comic miniseries in 2005 and then another in 2011, The Defenders never really caught the attention of non-comic readers the way that other comic book projects did.

I figured I was safe.

The title fit the book and the imagined series extremely well. I was excited about it, even as I struggled to make the first book work.

It took a lot of redrafting (starting over and finding the right voice) before I hit on the novel that I was meant to write. And the catalyst for me was a short story that I wrote to explain Pammy Griffin to myself. The story’s called “Blaming The Arsonist.” It appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine earlier this year.

“Blaming The Arsonist” took a few drafts all by itself. Initially, I thought it began in May of 1969, when the People’s Park turned into such a nightmare in Berkeley, California. But the actual story took place much earlier—in January of that year. The things you learn when you research—such as the fact that an arsonist was working the UC-Berkeley campus in January of 1969, and that arsonist was never caught. (At least that I know of.)

As I wrote “Blaming The Arsonist,” another character showed up. A former Vietnam Vet, a nurse, named June Eagleton, whom everyone calls Eagle. Once she appeared, I had the novel in my head completely because she was the missing piece.

Like Marvel’s Defenders, my Defenders was also about a team, and that team was Val, Pammy, and Eagle.

Only…Marvel screwed me up.

By the time I wrote the book that’s coming out in October, Marvel and Netflix had announced a TV series called The Defenders. I had a long talk with Dean about it. At that point, streaming wasn’t as big a thing as it is now. And no one knew if these Marvel properties on Netflix would take off.

But we knew the book would appear the same fall that the Netflix TV series would premiere, and that would result in a lot of confusion. Better to change the title of my book.

We batted around a million ideas, including synonyms for defenders. Guardians was wrong, sentinels was really wrong, and many of the other words just seemed like weaker versions of the same thing.

I don’t remember if I suggested A Gym of Her Own or if Dean did, but that title is the one that stuck.

It’s memorable. And we liked it inhouse.

We had trouble figuring out a cover for it, though. We even ran it by the hardcore Nelscott fans. Most of them were lukewarm about the covers they saw, and a handful said that the book didn’t sound like something they would be interested in.

All they had were mock-up covers and a title. That should have been a red flag. But it wasn’t.

Then one of my subsidiary rights partners, a man who loves my work, got the book. As far as I can tell, he didn’t read it because he went over it in a day (which he never does). I think he looked at the cover and the title, and decided the book wasn’t for their company.

His letter was lukewarm at best. I’d seen letters like that before, back when I wrote the first Smokey Dalton book. I’d also seen it with Kristine Grayson’s Tiffany Tumbles. Those letters were trying very hard to not to say this:

Your novel is about a group (type/protected class) of people we think will not appeal to our audience.

Now, I was starting to get a clue. That bothered me a lot, but I couldn’t quite figure out what he objected to. And since he was being cagey about it, I couldn’t figure out how to ask without being a whiny author.

We put the ebook up for preorder, and the sales were slow. We ran Amazon ads for all of the Nelscott books and by far, the one with the fewest clicks or even page looks was A Gym of Her Own. The one with the most was Street Justice, which is a great mystery title, even in teeny tiny thumbnail.

And that’s when Mystery Reader Kris spoke to Writer Kris. Would I buy a book called A Gym of Her Own? Absolutely.

But…

The title does not scream mystery or crime or noir. At all. It sounds mainstream. And even though the back cover copy talks about crime, it could still be read as mainstream/literary. Kris Nelscott has always been a bit of a literary darling. It wouldn’t be a big stretch to think she had written a literary novel.

Oooops.

So, I brought it up at WMG. And heard that a few others had noticed the sales were surprisingly slow, and there was an enthusiasm gap. We put together even more evidence from other responses, and realized that some readers thought the title A Gym of Her Own was synonymous with Feminist Screed.

Sigh. That’s not at all what this book is.

The best title for the book is, by far, Defenders. And I plan to write more books about Val, Pammy, and Eagle—some together and some separately.

Hmmm, rather like The Defenders on Netflix. Only they did the other series first—Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and the one I couldn’t watch, Iron Fist. Unlike Marvel, I wrote the overall first, and will do books about the individuals later.

Only when I talked about doing the individual books, we always had trouble with the marketing. Would the subtitle be a Gymof Her Own Novel featuring Val or A Gym Novel Starring Valentina Wilson or what? Too many words. Again, Defenders would have worked better. Defenders: Val or something like that.

But I couldn’t use Defenders. And I had gone the synonym route before.

Still, Allyson Longueira read aloud all the synonyms she could find. We discussed them.

And I had. Because in my mind, defenders are active people. They’re out in the world, fighting, which was the vision I had for the novel and for the series.

The word protectors, on the other hand, sounded like people who were dug in, who were maybe hiding or being quiet or being strong but not active. They would fight, but only when necessary which…dammit…is part of what the book is about.

Still, I was rolling the word around in my head when Allyson handed me the Advance Reading Copy of Gym, and I looked at the cover. With the cover Allyson had designed, three tough women near Sather Gate, the word protectors didn’t seem passive. It had a nicely menacing feel.

And it feels a lot more like a mystery than A Gym of Her Own. Less feminist screed, more crime.

I never would have settled on the word Protectors as the title of the book if it weren’t for Allyson’s cover. And while Protectors isn’t Defenders, it’s 9,000 times better than A Gym of Her Own.

So, about one month from publication, we’re changing the title. On everything.

We can do that because WMG Publishing is a nimble press. It isn’t hiring web presses to produce books six months in advance. It’s working on the same deadlines as indie writers. We could change the title one week after publication if we wanted to.

Plus, Protectors works for the entire series—or all four series, really. Because Val will have her novels, Eagle will have hers, Pammy will have hers, and occasionally the three of them will band together. We can use Protectors the same way I envisioned using Defenders. We really couldn’t do that with A Gym of Her Own.

Now all I need is the time to write the novels that are floating around in my head. Or rather, finish three of the starts that I had for Val. Take some of the material I had for Pammy and make that into a novel…with the three of them, I think. And write an Eagle book that’s been bugging me.

Plus there’s this hippie-dippy character in Protectors who really should get her own book. Does that make her part of the series too?

And suddenly…I’m overwhelmed with the amount of writing I want to do. Right Now.

You all know how that goes.

Titles are important. Sometimes they give the wrong message. I think A Gym of Her Own did that, unfortunately.

But titles should be memorable as well, and A Gym of Her Own is unique and memorable. Protectors is less so, but it works with the book’s theme so that helps. Plus, there will be more Protectors novels, so the title will get reinforced.

And then there’s this: The package for a book is still a package. With the wrong cover art, Protectors would have been a bad title too.

I think this package gives the series launch a better chance than the substitute title did. We’ll see how it all goes.

Because that’s the other thing about this new world of publishing: the launch is no longer important. The viability of the novel longterm is what matters. For this series (these series) to be successful, I need to write more books about these women. Which I really, really, really want to do.

It’s all about pacing.

And that’s a post for another day.

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]]>http://kriswrites.com/2017/09/13/business-musings-rethinking-a-title/feed/1319870http://kriswrites.com/2017/09/13/business-musings-rethinking-a-title/Free Fiction Monday: Incident at Lonely Rockshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/kriswrites/vIQx/~3/ph25gy9xVT0/
http://kriswrites.com/2017/09/11/free-fiction-monday-incident-at-lonely-rocks/#commentsMon, 11 Sep 2017 19:00:47 +0000http://kriswrites.com/?p=19898Oscar cleans portable toilets for a living. He loves the job—it takes him to beautiful isolated places, like the Lonely Rocks Wayside on the Oregon Coast. Nothing really grosses him out either—until he discovers the body, slashed to death, with a knife still in the chest. Then he sees a break in the guardrail above the ocean, a second car, a ruined bicycle, and Oscar realizes his troubles have just begun.

“Incident at Lonely Rocks,” by New York Times bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook through various online retailers here.

Incident at Lonely Rocks

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Winter on the Oregon beaches was unlike winter anywhere else. Winter on the beach meant fifty-degree temperatures, and the occasional rain. The surf was high, but the beaches were empty—tourists spent their vacation dollars on Maui or the Virgin Islands or even Las Vegas in December.

But Oscar loved the beach. And he loved the fact that his route took him there every single week.

Mondays were his beach day. He drove from the warehouse, which was on a side road exactly between Seavy Village and Anchor Bay, and headed north. His first stop was always at the Lonely Rocks Wayside, and he’d always think it was incredibly well named.

Not once had he ever seen a car parked there, not once had he watched a tourist walk along the beach. When he arrived, there was only him, the crumbling parking lot, and the POTS portable toilet, which was as close to the highway as he could get it.

He would pull up alongside the toilet, get out his scrubber and bucket, then put on his gloves. He’d keep the ignition on—he had to; the hose wouldn’t work without it—and then he’d get out. He’d open the toilet’s door, stick the hose through the hole, and let the machine suck the waste into the large container at the back of his truck.

He also had another portable toilet strapped into the back in case he had to switch one out or he got called to a new job. Usually that toilet remained there for most of the week.

Then, when he finished vacuuming out the waste, he scrubbed the interior, and added new chemicals in the portable toilet’s storage container. He had become a fast cleaner, and a precise one. His motto was simple: he wanted moms and grandmoms to comfortably use his toilets.

He particularly liked the Lonely Rocks Wayside. It had been built in the 1950s as a large turnout where tourists could watch the waves. Over the years, it had had slight upgrades: the parking lot was now asphalt instead of flattened dirt, a guardrail had been placed along the cliffside, and state-produced signs told idiots not to climb over the side. POTS got the wayside’s first and only portable toilet contract in 1991, and Oscar had been servicing Lonely Rocks ever since.

Oscar figured it was the highway warning signs that kept the casual tourist away. In addition to the Beware Sunken Grade signs that dotted every mile of the old road (it wasn’t Highway 101 any more; the state had gotten terrified of the erosion this high up, and had moved the highway two miles inland—away from the ocean), there were Do Not Walk signs posted along the shoulder and Caution: Unstable Ground signs even closer to the wayside itself.

Most out-of-state tourists didn’t know Oregon terminology, so the “sunken grade” signs wouldn’t bother them. Sunken grade meant the same thing that the unstable ground sign meant with a slight twist: Sunken Grade would most easily be translated as Sinking Road.

He was a native Oregonian, which was why he always stopped his heavy truck on a turnout on the east side of the highway, just before the sunken grade signs started. Then he’d walk the length—again on the east side, away from the ocean—and inspect the road, just to make sure it was sturdy enough for the one-ton plus he would drive across it.

So far, he’d been lucky. But a few times, he had come across crumbled asphalt on the far end of the wayside about 100 yards past his delivery spot. Then he’d turn around, and go the ten miles out of his way on the highway, heading to the next wayside. He’d call the deteriorating road in to both the State Police and the Oregon Department of Transportation, figuring that he would be the first to discover it, even if the slide had happened in a storm three or four days before.

In the winter, hardly anyone used this road. In the summer, he mostly saw folks he called “environmental tourists,” people with Protect the Earth bumper stickers or bikes or camping gear on the back of their car. The SUVs or the families whose kids had iPods hardly came here.

This morning, the road had seemed stable. There hadn’t been serious storms or high surf in the past week, so he gave the road only a cursory inspection. Then he drove up alongside the portable toilet, and started his ritual.

He put the truck in park, and left it idling. He set the emergency brake and got out. He paused, mostly because he couldn’t help it, and took a big sniff of the fresh ocean air. A touch of salt and a bit of brine all mixed with the chill that suggested the water itself. He loved it.

Just like he loved the view: the Lonely Rocks, all five of them, standing (that’s how the brochures described them) in the surf, looking forever like people in a semi-circle with their backs to each other. He would’ve named it the Angry Rocks—he could almost imagine their fronts, the scowling faces, the crossed arms—but he supposed people would want something more dramatic with a name like that, instead of one of those silent stand-offs his ex-wife used to give him in the last few years of their marriage.

Then he squared his shoulders and headed to the portable toilet. POTS toilets were a light green. The company got its start renting toilets to logging companies, and for some reason, some designer thought it would best to have the toilets blend into the scenery.

Oscar always wondered about that—when someone needed a john, he needed a john; he didn’t need to search for it because it blended in with the trees. Here, the light green looked slightly out of place. The trees along this cliff-face were scraggly, wind-ravaged pine, with needles so dark they almost looked black.

Against the asphalt, the green seemed festive, and more than once, he’d found one of those see-through Oregon Ducks stickers pasted onto the door. If the company hadn’t minded, he would’ve left the sticker on—he understood team spirit; it had taken him through that glorious season when the football team he’d played for couldn’t do anything wrong—but he had to follow regs. Nothing but the company logo on the outside (a big P with a toilet-bowl-shaped O, a T behind that in a way that kinda looked like a toilet, and an S that seemed to brace the entire mess up) and a spotless piney-fresh interior.

This toilet looked relatively new—it had the new curved door handle that informed someone outside whether the toilet was occupied or not—and it didn’t have a lot of scratches or polished-off graffiti marks.

He walked around the toilet first, making sure nothing had happened to the outside. He braced a hand on the side of the toilet and accidentally shoved it, which made it rock.

Something banged inside.

In fact, it banged so hard, he nearly toppled over. Weight had shifted.

Someone had planted something inside his portable toilet.

Then his breath caught. Had he interrupted a customer? A hiker maybe? Someone frightened by the required beep-beep-beep of the truck as it backed up?

He could just imagine some scrawny hiker in his Birkenstocks, huddled inside, waiting for civilization go away.

“Hey!” he said. “C’mon out. It’s okay.”

He almost banged on the reinforced plastic wall, then thought the better of it. That would probably scare Mr. Birkenstock even more.

So he went around front, and stopped as he peered at the door. It wasn’t latched from the inside. The little red sign that changed as the handle latched read Vacant.

He felt a little relief at that. Never once, in all his years as a POTS customer service representative had he ever tried to clean a toilet with someone in it.

Although that didn’t explain the weight shift. He might have to amend his record to never cleaning a toilet with someone obviously in it. There was no way to tell this thing was occupied. The parking lot was empty, there was no backpack or camping gear outside (not that there was a place to camp anywhere near Lonely Rocks, although there was a great hiking trail—if you didn’t mind that it could crumble out beneath you at any minute), and the door wasn’t latched.

He couldn’t be blamed for making this kind of mistake.

“Hey!” he said again. “My name’s Rollston. I service these toilets. No need to be scared of me. Are you okay?”

No one answered. And he had the odd feeling that no one would.

Then he frowned. Kids. Kids were the only downside of this job. Not little kids, who actually loved outdoor toilets, seeing them as an exotic novelty. Not even the local high school crowd, which mostly found the toilets gross, if they thought of them at all.

No, the kids that bothered him were the college kids. Old enough to come to the coast unsupervised for the weekend, but young enough to forget that the word “responsibility” applied even here.

Those kids would get drunk, build fires on the beaches, and toddle up to the nearest portable toilet to get rid of the excess beer. Then they’d get the bright idea in their head that they needed to mess with the toilet somehow. Sometimes that messing was just a team sticker. But most often, it manifested in the urge to turn the toilet turtle.

Oscar never understood why. Did the kids think there was a hole underneath it? The toilet just had a receptacle under the seat, a receptacle filled with chemicals to dissolve the waste and get rid of the smell. The things were designed to be turned on their side and not spill (too much) unless they were overfull—and he never let his get overfull. So the irritation was just that he had to right the toilet before he could clean it.

An extra five minutes, which bothered him in the summer, and usually didn’t disturb him at all in the winter.

But sometimes the kids were creative. Sometimes they stashed things inside the toilet. The worst was the bear hide wrapped around a wooden frame. The hide still had a head, and damn if that thing didn’t look real when he opened the door the first time and damn if he didn’t let out a little scream as he slammed the door shut—not something he’d want his old football buddies to know. But not many of his old football buddies would’ve opened the door again, either.

He had, and he’d been fine. (He’d half expected that bear to lunge out at him, but it hadn’t. It hadn’t moved at all, which was the thing that tipped him off to its fakeness.)

He expected something like that here. Some kind of prank—a log, maybe, or a mannequin. He’d come across things like that before, things people had intentionally or otherwise left inside the portable toilets, and while they’d given him a start, they’d never scared him.

Not like that fake bear.

He knocked one final time, hoping that someone would open the door. When no one did, he squared his shoulders, put his fingers in the little half-moon handle, and pulled.

The door came open easily enough. That surprised him and, looking back on it, he wasn’t sure why. Later, he realized that everything about the toilet had surprised him, and yet the parts registered separately, not as a cohesive whole.

First the door, then the flies—an entire swarm of them, buzzing around him as if it were summer. He tried to wipe them away from his face with his free arm.

Then the darkness—he thought the entire place was in shadow, even though he knew it wasn’t: there had been sunlight on the door, after all. But the interior looked dark, and these places only looked dark when they were in shadow.

Only he tried not to leave them in shadow, so no one would be tempted to pull a prank or get hurt using the facilities.

What he saw as darkness was actually blood, great gobs of it, dried black against the molded plastic walls.

And finally, he saw the body, wedged—which was the wrong word, because obviously, he’d heard the body flopping around—between the tiny sink and the side wall. The body belonged to a man, a Birkenstock wearer just like Oscar had initially suspected, only this guy had a knife stuck up to the hilt in the left side of his flannel shirt. He had a pair of glasses hanging from one ear, and his face looked naked. It also looked weird, with the blood spatter on one side, but not on the other. It took Oscar a while to figure out that the glasses had been in place when the guy died.

Oscar had probably dislodged the glasses. He’d probably moved the entire body as he had shoved the portable toilet.

That made his stomach heave. He backed out of the toilet and ran toward the guardrail, planning to let go of his breakfast over the edge.

He didn’t quite make it. He lost a great meal on the side of the asphalt, crouching so that he barely missed his shoes.

He stayed that way for a minute, afraid he’d lose more. He couldn’t very well leave the guy here, but he couldn’t take him either. That would be tampering with a crime scene, right? Oscar watched a lot of the detective programs on television—from CSI to all its spin-offs, and its non-fiction inspiration shows on Discovery and PBS, and he knew that touching stuff was the worst thing he could do.

So was panicking.

He swallowed against the bile still rising in his throat, and made himself concentrate. No car, no other people, nothing obvious. He wasn’t in any danger, even though his heart was pounding.

He had time to consider his next move.

He stood slowly. His stomach was settling down. He headed to his truck. He had a cell phone in there, mounted on the sun flap. If he called for help, all he had to do was wait for it, here, with his portable toilets, and the poor soul who had died in one.

Obviously not in the act of using it either. The guy had died there, but he hadn’t locked the door when he had gone inside. You’d think if some guy was being attacked by a maniac with a knife, he’d go into the nearest building—even if it was made of plastic and had thin walls—and lock the door.

Maybe the guy didn’t have time. Maybe he had run inside, the killer had grabbed the door, and stabbed him, and then left, while the poor victim flailed about inside, trying to pull the knife free and failing.

Although shouldn’t a knife hold the blood in? Hadn’t Oscar read somewhere that a stabbing victim should never remove a knife, that the knife would keep him from bleeding to death?

Oscar was breathing hard. He flipped open his cell and stared at the reception bar.

Nothing. He should’ve remembered that. One reason he loved this route was that his boss couldn’t call him and make him veer off it, not without exquisite timing and a lot of luck.

“Damn,” Oscar whispered. But he slipped the phone onto his belt clip and walked back to the scene.

He was already thinking of it as a crime scene. How TV of him. He wasn’t any kind of detective and he couldn’t figure things out. He had just stumbled on something awful, and now, it seemed, his brain wasn’t working quite right.

He had to get calm before he took the next step, whatever that would be. He walked away from the truck and headed toward the guardrail. Maybe the Lonely Rocks would know. Maybe they would help him remember where the cell reception started again or where the nearest police station was.

Or ranger station. Or some kind of Coast Guard unit. Any place with someone official.

The ocean was bright blue with a topping of snow-white foam near the rocks. In the distance, the horizon blended with the ocean, looking like the kind of smudge an artist would deliberately make with chalk by rubbing his finger along a firm line.

Oscar made himself concentrate on that smudge as he crossed the parking lot, trying to remind himself that this was just a blip in his day, a bad event, one that he could cope with if he only tried hard enough.

He just didn’t want to be alone with it, nor, for some reason he didn’t fully understand, did he want to leave the poor victim alone. The guy had been alone long enough already.

The far edge of the guardrail was battered, and a section was missing. Oscar frowned. He hadn’t noticed that before, but it meant nothing. He hardly ever came this far down the parking lot, both because he never needed to—you could see the ocean from the road—and because the sliding earth made him nervous. The asphalt already had big cracks in it, and he—with his oversize footballer’s frame—didn’t want to be the guy to send another section tumbling toward the sea.

He stopped, his heart pounding. He needed to leave this all for the experts.

But he couldn’t. He needed to go forward, to see if the break in the rail had something to do with the poor slob in the portable toilet.

Cautiously, he took the next few steps, putting a foot down, then easing his weight onto it, then taking the next step. The ground felt stable enough. There hadn’t been a lot of rain, so the ground shouldn’t have been saturated. And there hadn’t been a lot of wind or high surf, so nothing should have been eroded from underneath.

In other words, he had nothing to fear.

Except that hole in the guardrail, and that body in the toilet.

He squared his shoulders again—a trick, he realized, he’d learned from his old coach—and continued forward, reaching the middle of the still-intact guard rail and peering over.

The upside down station wagon didn’t surprise him. Its undercarriage was scratched and dented, probably from going end-over-end as it headed toward the water.

It got hung up on one of the larger lava rocks near the edge of the surf. The car’s front end pointed toward the sky, the wheels looking oddly vulnerable in the morning light.

An expensive bicycle had been thrown clear, its frame twisted and flattened, probably by the weight of the car.

To the car’s right, he saw camping equipment, scattered on the cliffside, and one of those pointed cycler’s helmets hanging from a bush.

It took him another minute to realize that what he thought was a pile of blankets was actually another human being.

The bile rose in his throat again. Two dead? How could that happen out here?

“Hey!” he shouted down, mostly out of hope rather than any thought that someone would be alive after that crash. “Hey! You okay down there?”

His voice sounded faint and ineffective against the surf, pounding against the rocks below. On this side of the parking lot, he would have trouble hearing cars as they passed. He doubted anyone could have heard him talking to the poor dead guy in the can, or the beep-beep-beep of his truck as he’d parked.

“Hey!” he shouted again. “You okay?”

The person—a woman?—raised her head. He took two steps backwards in surprise. He really hadn’t thought that person was alive at all.

But, he realized as he went back to the edge, she couldn’t have gotten there by falling out of the tumbling car. She had to have slipped down the side, or pulled her way up from the bottom. She was resting on a rock ledge, and the reason he’d thought she was all blankets was because she had made a nest of her clothing.

She had been there a while and, judging by the claw marks in the loose dirt above her, she’d tried to climb up more than once.

“Hello!” he shouted. “You all right?”

She nodded, but held up hands scraped and filthy, just in case he didn’t get the point. She shouted something at him.

“I didn’t get that,” he yelled back.

She shouted again, only slower. He read her lips more than heard her. She said, The ledge is crumbling.

Great. Now if he went away and she died, it would be his fault. He had to get her out of there, without hurting her or him or killing them both.

He didn’t have rope, but he did have thick cords—which his colleagues incorrectly called bungees—that he wrapped around the new portable toilet in the back. He had extra cords, just in case he had to do a pick-up or seal a door on a malfunctioning toilet until he could come back to it.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” he yelled to the woman, hoping she could hear him over the surf. He ran—he hadn’t run since college; his knees ached, and he suddenly realized how out of shape he had let himself become—and reached the side of the truck in what seemed like forever. He could imagine the crumbling ledge in his mind, the way that the rock shifted, the unsteadiness of it; a slight movement would make it fall away altogether.

First, breathe. Thank god for Coach Stevens. The man’s instructions were in his head—they were about football, but they’d have to do. Oscar had never been in another situation like this.

He breathed. Then realized he had to test the cords to see if he could hook them together in a way that would hold. The older ones had frayed hooks and pulls. He tossed those in the truck bed, and removed the newer ones from the new toilet. If someone drove up on this deserted road and stole the damn thing, so be it. His employers would have to understand.

It took him a minute to hook the cords together, but they seemed stable enough to get a small woman up a crumbling hillside. Not that he had any way of measuring this.

Still he wasn’t sure his back could take the weight. He unhooked the bungees at the back of the truck, then he lowered the gate. He eased the new portable off, using his back and knees like he always did when he put a new toilet in place.

It looked kinda funny next to the old toilet, but he couldn’t worry about that.

He raised the gate, then hooked it in place. He got in the truck, and backed toward the guardrail.

He tried not to think about the cracking asphalt. He told himself that the broken guardrail had happened when the station wagon went through it, not when the ground fell away, but he didn’t lie that well, not even to himself.

He stopped the truck several yards from the guardrail—he couldn’t quite bring himself to get as close as possible: the last thing he wanted to do was save her and then have the entire cliffside crumble beneath her, him, and the truck.

He didn’t want to hook the cords to the back gate—it was too unstable—so he found a thick piece of metal near one of the wheel wells. Then he unspooled the cords and hurried to the guardrail.

As he looked over, he prayed that she was still there. The movement of the truck could shake earth this unstable and be the last straw for that ledge.

He didn’t want to be the one to kill her, just because he was trying to save her.

But she was still there, crouched against the side, the blue ocean beneath her, crashing into the rocks and spraying foam up the grass-and-sand hillside.

He held up the cord, but before he tossed it, he mimed tying it around his stomach.

He wasn’t sure how much she got of that, but she nodded. He swallowed hard and tossed the cords, listening to them clang as the metal hooks hit rock on the way down.

The cords curved over the guardrail because he couldn’t think of any other way to do it. She reached up, missed, then reached again. He kept feeding cord to her. As he did, he studied the guardrail.

This part looked safe enough. The base was embedded into the earth, and the ground looked solid—not that he could tell, really, but he had to trust something.

He’d try to pull her up himself first, and if that didn’t work, then he’d use the truck. If he just used the truck by itself, he was afraid he’d use too much speed or it wouldn’t work and she’d fall and he wouldn’t know until the cord came up empty, bouncing on the asphalt.

His ex-wife said he had an imagination for trouble. This morning, he was certainly proving her right.

He couldn’t do much more thinking. He just had to act.

He almost wrapped the loose back end of the cord around himself before it tightened in the woman’s hands, but at the last minute, he decided not to. What if she was heavier than he expected? What if she pulled him over the edge?

Then they’d both be screwed.

He wiped his hands on his pants, then gripped the cord tightly. She was balanced precariously on that ledge, trying to make a half-hitch with the cord and her own body. She seemed to have some kind of wilderness experience, or maybe she was just one of those really competent people who knew how to do things like hitch a rope to themselves, knew it instinctively.

He watched her, his mouth dry.

Then she gripped the cord, much like he was, and tugged just a little. He started to pull, but as he did, she placed her feet on the cliffside wall and climbed like she’d done this before.

She was using his strength and his balance to give her a foundation, but she was pulling herself up. One hand over the other, one step at a time, she was coming up that hillside.

He kept the cord taut, praying it wouldn’t separate, praying he had the right ones—the ones that wouldn’t fray.

What if they frayed whenever pressure was applied to them?

God, he had to make that voice in his head shut up. He hadn’t realized how very annoying it was until now.

The woman stopped halfway and shook one of her hands like it hurt. He bit his lower lip, tasting blood.

C’mon, honey, he thought. Just a little more.

He didn’t want to pull and dislodge her.

She put her hand back on the cord, and continued, shaking that hand whenever it wasn’t the dominant one.

As she got closer, he realized she wasn’t as young as he thought. Her face had that unnatural thinness that middle-aged smokers or those weird vegetarians who didn’t eat anything good or people with cancer had. Her skin was tan and sallow at the same time, but he figured that might be because she had been on the ledge. Her hair was tangled with leaves and brush and dirt.

He could hear her breathe, which reminded him to do it. He breathed, feeling the strain in his back as she got closer.

Finally she was within his reach. He bent over the guardrail—metal poking into his stomach—and offered her his hand. He had as firm a grip as he could on the cord with his other hand.

She looked at it, like she was unwilling to let go of the cord. Then she let go with her bad hand and reached toward his, missing his fingers entirely, and clamping onto his wrist.

He had no choice but to take her wrist. Considering how wet her hand felt against his skin, this was a better choice. No sliding apart—no bad movie moment when their hands touch and then separate, followed by a scream as she fell to her death.

He tugged, the muscles in his back pulling as he yanked her from an odd angle. She scrambled up the side, collapsed against the guardrail, and let him pull her over it.

He had to grab onto her belt to do it, tugging her over the metal like he was giving her a wedgie. They fell backward, and he took the brunt of the fall, landing on asphalt and still wrapped cord. Pain shuddered through him—the familiar pain of a bad tackle—and his eyes watered.

She lay on top of him, and for a minute, he wondered if he’d hurt her. Then she rolled off and let out a huge sigh.

“Oh, God,” she said in a curiously flat tone. “Did I hurt you?”

“No,” he lied. He wanted to stay on his back but he didn’t dare. As Coach Stevens used to say, only babies rested.

He sat up. She was peering at him as if she didn’t quite recognize him, as if she didn’t remember what he had done.

He smiled reassuringly, but she didn’t smile back. Instead, she wiped at her face with the back of one hand. The dirt flaked off her cheek, and that was when he realized that she wasn’t covered in dirt; she was covered in dried blood.

“What happened to you?” he asked, thinking he could mask his growing panic, but something of it must have shown in his face or in his voice because her eyes widened.

“I fell,” she said in that flat tone. Emotionless, almost cold. Was she talking like that because she was in shock?

“I can see that,” he said. “Were you in the car? Is anyone else in the car?”

She wiped at her face again, then licked her chapped lips. Her hands were the worst. They were covered in real dirt and dried blood. On her right hand, her fingernails were gone.

“I don’t remember,” she said, but this time, her voice warbled.

“You don’t remember if anyone else is in the car?”

She shook her head. “What happened?”

He frowned. She was wearing black leather shoes with some kind of heel. Scuffed and ruined now, they had the look of shoes that cost money.

They weren’t Birkenstocks.

“Was that your car?” he asked, sure it had to be. Two accidents—and a murder!—couldn’t have taken place at the same site, could they? Not in the same week.

She swallowed, then glanced at the portable toilet. The look sent a chill through him. He was about to reach for her when she took off.

She ran for the truck. He lumbered to his feet and hurried after her, but she would reach the door long before he’d get close. She dragged the bungee cords behind her, and he stomped on the nearest one.

It held and she kept running. He bent over and grabbed the end, then yanking on it so hard that he had to take three steps backwards.

She flew backwards, and landed, hitting her head on the asphalt. She didn’t move.

He prayed she was all right—he didn’t need another body here, not one wrapped in his bungee cords—and he hurried to her side. Her eyes were rolling, but she was conscious, and when she saw him, she started to scramble up.

“If you tell me what happened,” he said, “I can help you.”

She kicked him, hitting his left knee. He gasped at the shuddery sensation that went through him, and knew, suddenly, that she had shattered something.

She was reaching for the metal edge of one of the bungee cords. He growled like the linebacker he used to be and lunged for her, ignoring the pain, dragging his malfunctioning leg. He slammed her into the back end of the truck and held her in place as he wrapped the bungee cords around her until she looked like a tied-up character in a Warner Brothers cartoon.

He hoisted her into the back of the truck, but knew he couldn’t keep her there. She’d free herself. He was shaking. He limped to the driver’s side, got in, and drove to the two portable toilets. Then he got out again, went to the back of the truck, and picked her up as if she weighed no more than a child.

It was hard to carry her when he couldn’t brace his leg, but he did anyway. He used a fireman’s hold, making sure her feet were on his backside. She wriggled and kicked and called him names; he wasn’t sure if she was in her right mind. He’d been trying to help her, for heaven’s sake, and now she was trying to hurt him.

But she knew he’d seen the cuts on her hands—not the missing fingernails; those came from trying to climb free. But the cuts, the kind that could only come from a knife blade. He’d seen a few knife fights in his day; he knew what offensive wounds looked like. Defensive wounds were on the palms. Offensive were on the backs and sides of the hand.

Like hers.

He shoved her wrapped body inside the clean portable toilet and closed the door. Then he took one of the old bungee cords and wrapped it around the door, pulling it tight.

She’d be okay in there for a little while. But he couldn’t risk leaving her here, not even for the short time it would take to drive to a cell phone reception area.

So he got in the truck again, drove it to the edge of the highway, and then backed it up. He kept the keys in the ignition, got out, and lowered the gate.

Reloading would be hard. His leg felt like it was on fire. He could scarcely move his entire left side. But he’d have to, one last time.

Getting portable toilets back on the truck took some doing. Normally, he would brace his legs, rock the thing, and move it just enough that it would sit on the lip of the truck gate. He’d have to do that now with only one leg, and a lot of determination.

Coach Stevens still spoke in his head. Their only bowl game—not the Rose Bowl, but so damn close that it mattered to them. His last game. Coach pulled him aside, said give it everything. This is your last chance for glory. Don’t worry about how it hurts. Just see how superhuman you can be.

Oscar dragged himself behind the portable toilet and grabbed it on both sides. Then he shoved with the shoulder opposite his good leg, and rocked the thing.

The woman screamed, the sound muffled through the plastic. The damn toilet was heavier because of her. He wasn’t sure he could move it even with two good legs.

Then she slammed herself against the door, and that was enough to loosen it. He rocked it just a little, and it came to rest on the lip. He shoved, and the toilet slid into place.

He leaned for a minute, sweat rolling down his face, his breathing harsh. But he didn’t have a lot of time to rest. She was still screaming and rocking, and if he didn’t move fast, she might knock the entire toilet over.

He closed the gate, then slammed the button with his fist. The lift rose and she screamed louder. At least he didn’t have to worry that she couldn’t breathe. With those lungs, it was clear she was doing just fine.

He used the three remaining bungees to strap the portable toilet in place. Then, bracing one hand on the side of the truck, he hobbled to the driver’s seat. He got in, closed his eyes, and tried to breathe away the throbbing in his knee.

It didn’t work.

At least it was his left knee and the truck was an automatic. He could drive away from here. His hands were shaking. It took two tries to get the truck in gear. He wasn’t thinking clearly, he could feel it. He felt like he was underwater.

He’d felt this way before, after the big game. He’d cracked two ribs and had a concussion, and had been going into shock. But they’d won. Coach had praised him. The papers had praised him.

He still had them framed on the wall of his apartment. Not even his greedy ex-wife had gotten those.

Shock. He didn’t have a concussion now, but he wouldn’t be making good decisions. He couldn’t be on the road long. He got out his cell phone and propped it on the dash, waiting for the reception bar. Nothing.

He made himself breathe, then put the truck into drive. He rolled onto the highway, and turned back the way he’d come. Behind him, he could hear the portable toilet thumping on the back gate. He hoped she didn’t damage anything; it would probably come out of his salary.

The trees loomed over him like the living trees in the Wizard of Oz. It was dark here, and the road twisty. He had to focus on the asphalt, driving so slow that he felt like he wasn’t moving at all.

He kept glancing at the reception bar, and when it finally jumped to full, he pulled over, put on his flashers, and dialed 911. He gave the dispatch the mile marker, asked for an ambulance and the sheriff, and then closed his eyes.

They had to shake him awake when they finally showed up.

* * *

He got the story in bits and pieces, some of it from the cops in the hospital, some of it from the TV news, the rest from the papers. The station wagon belonged to Mr. Birkenstock—a hiker named Jorry Kling. He was single and unmarried. Near as the cops could figure, he’d picked her up. She’d been hitchhiking.

Her ruined clothes were expensive, but she had no luggage. Later, her defense attorney would claim she’d been ambushed in Astoria, raped and beaten, and had managed to escape, hitchhiking south. Then Kling had picked her up and somewhere along the way, she’d forgotten he was her rescuer. When they stopped at the wayside, she’d tried to take the car.

But that didn’t explain his body’s position or the fact that the car had gone through the guardrail. She hadn’t come back up the cliff to fight Kling and stuff him into a portable toilet.

Oscar had to testify at the trial, saying that she seemed okay until he asked her about the car, and then she’d attacked him too. Turned out that she had a history of attacking people—stabbing her mother in Longview, Washington; trying to shove another driver out of his car when he’d picked her up (and he’d shoved her out and drove away). She had had some kind of psychotic break, and the real victim of it had been Kling.

No one knew for certain what happened at that wayside. Only that Kling had ended up dead, and she’d ended up on the ledge, probably after losing control of the car she’d killed Kling to steal.

Oscar, though, had become something of a local hero, trying to save a girl only to have her turn on him.

And in those weeks of interviews—some even for big magazines in the East (Port-A-Potty Man Saves Psycho! read one headline, which really offended him, because he worked for POTS, not Port-A-Potty), he kept getting the question he hated—How come you do this job?

No one liked his answer, about the pride in his work and the chance to drive to remote parts of the best state in the lower 48. So he finally had to give them an answer they understood: It paid well.

It did, too. Commission on each toilet he delivered plus his weekly salary. Turned out he made more than some of the bozos who asked him questions.

Money they understood. The rest they didn’t. Like how antsy he got during the rehab, how much he wanted to be in his truck again.

The first day back, a Monday, he had to drive with his boss in the truck, just to make sure he could handle the work. He did just fine, reveling in the narrow highway, the crouching trees, the ocean peeking through the spring leaves.

He stopped, like he always did, and checked out the asphalt before going to the Lonely Rocks Wayside. His boss bleated at him, worried that Oscar was scared to return to the scene of the crime.

But Oscar ignored him and followed the routine.

The rest of the winter, the part he had missed, had come with heavy rains and high tides. The road looked even more unstable than it had before. But he could stand on it, and when he returned to the truck, he didn’t say anything, just drove forward.

The guy who’d replaced him had put the new portable toilet in the wrong place. It was hard to get to.

But Oscar didn’t complain. Instead, he got out of the truck and stopped, just like he had dozens of times in the past, taking a deep breath of the fresh ocean air.

He loved this place. It didn’t matter that some psycho woman had committed murder here. It didn’t matter that he’d have a permanent limp because of her.

She’d give him a second chance to go the distance, and he had. Twenty years and one hundred pounds after the last time, he found he still had the strength to push himself to the very edge.

It wasn’t about being a hero.

It wasn’t even about being more than a portable toilet service man, like the magazines had claimed.

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

]]>http://kriswrites.com/2017/09/11/free-fiction-monday-incident-at-lonely-rocks/feed/219898http://kriswrites.com/2017/09/11/free-fiction-monday-incident-at-lonely-rocks/Catching Up On Publicationshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/kriswrites/vIQx/~3/q6OLimMdDPU/
http://kriswrites.com/2017/09/09/catching-up-on-publications/#commentsSat, 09 Sep 2017 15:37:51 +0000http://kriswrites.com/?p=19877Because my life has been unbelievably hectic this past month or two, I wasn’t able to update you on my latest publications as I promised I would. I have had several—although not as many as I will have this fall.

So in no particular order, let me share the recent publications.

The latest Uncollected Anthology, Mystical Melodies, hit the virtual stands last month. My new story, “At The Crossroads,” is an Abracadabra Inc story. Yes, when I start throwing off stories that means something longer will happen eventually. You can get this story, and stories by Leah Cutter, Annie Reed, Dayle A. Dermatis, Rebecca Senese, Stephanie Writt, Leslie Claire Walker, and our guest author Brigid Collins, if you pick up the bundle here. Or pick and choose which story you want by going here and reading about them. That’s the cool thing about the Uncollected Anthology: It’s not collected, so you can just grab the stories you want. (Although I’d go for all of them, if I were you.)

Then there’s Heart’s Kiss. I really enjoy this magazine. I’m happy to see a romance magazine again, and I love the old-fashioned covers. They’re a great deal of fun.

My story in Issue 4 is called “Research and The Research Librarian.” A whole bunch of things coalesced as I wrote it. Research from another project, and the way things used to be at the Chicago Public Library when I did some early Kris Nelscott research combined into this story. You can read it for free on the website or you can pick up the issue. (I’d recommend picking up the issue. I want this magazine to last.) Enjoy!

Here’s a super fun concept. Tom Easton & Judith K. Dial edited a book of very short science fiction stories for those moments when you only have a few minutes to read. They call the book Science Fiction For The Throne, and I think the outhouse on the cover gives you an idea which throne they mean. Weirdly, there’s not an ebook. Or maybe not so weird. I mean, who wants to hold their phone or tablet while on that particular throne? They’ve reprinted my story “Sing.” It joins stories by Brenda Cooper, Nancy Kress, Jo Walton, David Brin, Gregory Benford, Brendan DuBois, and many many more writers. I think you’ll have a lot of fun with this one.

On Tuesday, I told you about my upcoming Kris Nelscott book, which was—on Tuesday—called A Gym of Her Own. We have since changed the title. I will have a full blog about that next week. (If you want to read the blog early, subscribe to my Patreon page. You’ll find 3 posts you haven’t seen yet.) The new title is Protectors. Here’s the new cover.

If you want to read a short story about one of the main characters in Protectors, then pick up Fiction River Presents: Readers Choice. My Kris Nelscott story, “Combat Medic,” was one of ten stories as the best or most memorable stories of the first four years of Fiction River. I’m really pleased to be in this volume. I didn’t expect it. The other stories are truly memorable. You’ll find stories here from Ron Collins, Anthea Lawson, Lee Allred, Chrissy Wissler, Dory Crowe, Debbie Mumford, Laura Ware, Louisa Swann, and JC Andrijeski. Allyson Longueira did a great job putting all of this disparate stories together into a strong volume of fiction. You will find an ebook of this volume, as well as a paper copy.

And that’s it…for the moment. You’ll hear from me again later in the month. Until then, enjoy!

Poking around through old last week, I found some predictions I had forgotten about. I wrote, in 2013, both in unfinished and finished blogs that it would take years for traditionally published writers to realize the world they’d been writing in was long gone. I could see that moment coming, as contracts ended, and new contracts started up.

What I didn’t foresee, and should have, was that traditional publishers would cut so many major bestsellers from their lists. Writers who made lots of money for the company had sales declines, just like everyone else.

Rather than negotiate a new contract, their publishers (particularly Penguin Random House) would stall and no longer answer queries about a new deal. Often these writers got new editors (several) along the way, and the new editors wouldn’t return phone calls to writers or their agents.

It was rejection by silence, the most nasty product of the new marketplace. Some editors would have the guts to tell their writers that any deal wouldn’t be to their liking. And some editors, off the record, would say that no deal was forthcoming.

Not until the writer or the agent pressed did the writer find out that their bestselling career had come to an end.

Now, most of these writers were not major bestsellers. These writers were making consistent six-figure incomes every year, not seven-figure incomes. Their books were selling well, until the entire industry upended itself, and rather than invest in a known product, their publishers threw these writers under the bus.

The moment I had predicted had arrived in late 2015, and got worse through the next year, and into 2017. Only I hadn’t expected it to be so brutal. Writers with solid careers were simply cut from publishers’ lists with no thanks, no by-your-leave, and no respect at all.

I had expected something else entirely. I had expected protracted contract negotiations that would end up with the writer making pennies compared with the deals that the writer had in the past. That’s what I expected for this second tier level of bestseller.

The midlist writers had already been cut from the lists, and I expected more midlist writers to get cut. Traditional publishers had long since stopped building writers’ careers, and hoped only for big mega bestsellers.

Traditional publishers had figured out, about 2005 or so, that their current business model worked on hope, not on hard work. They would rather buy a brand-new untested author, lock them up for a two-book contract and hope that those books sold better than the books already in the stable.

That didn’t work, so a lot of careers have been cut short.

But the second-tier bestsellers—I simply expected them to take less money than they had before.

And some of them are. One friend tells me that per book, he makes exactly one-tenth of what he earned ten years ago. He’s writing more and getting paid less. He’s also not getting royalties or subsidiary rights sales, because publishers are licensing everything.

He would indie publish, he tells me, but he doesn’t have the time. He’s just trying to keep his head above water.

He made millions from about 1990 to 2007, and saved none of it. Like many writers, he thought the money would continue.

The major bestsellers are having the awakening that I had expected for the second-tier bestsellers. Book contracts for non-savvy major bestsellers come with big numbers—both in money and in time. What I had found, in one of my old blogs, was a note that in October of 2014, Danielle Steel had signed a ten-book contract with a publisher that would keep her writing for them until 2020.

He doesn’t worry much about book sales either, except he’s very alert to the numbers. “The biggest change for me has been that I’m selling about half the books I sold before the Great Recession,” he said. “Maybe a little bit more than half. This is discretionary spending, and people are not spending.”

In reality, book sales have risen consistently for the past several years now. But Grisham isn’t the only traditional writer to see his sales decline.

In fact, his sales have declined less than most major bestsellers’ sales. After I became aware of that comment, I watched Camino Island’s performance on bestseller lists. On the USA Today list which tracks sales (not some whim of the list builder [cough: New York Times]), Grisham was number one for weeks.

On the new Amazon Charts, introduced at the same time as the book’s release, Camino Island was in the top five books being read, and always the top new book being read on that list. (I’m assuming the Charts only follow ebooks, since we paper readers who buy from Amazon don’t report our reading habits.)

Grisham still has loyal fans, but his readership has declined to his core readers. The folks who read him when they needed to read something reliable and couldn’t find any books by someone they loved, abandoned him with the rise of ebooks. Which was…wait for it…just after the Great Recession.

When Grisham’s contract is up, his publisher will want to keep him. But they probably won’t offer him the money they offered in the past. Nor will he get as sweet a deal as he got before the Great Recession.

I have no idea what will happen to Danielle Steel in 2020 (or 2019) when it comes time to negotiate her next book deal.

I can’t imagine that these major sellers will leave traditional publishing.

But so many people whom I never expected to leave are being kicked out. Some have savings, some don’t, but many are going from making a hell of a good living off their writing to making nothing.

So they’re popping their heads out of the sand, looking around, and seeing that indie writers are making money. The traditional folks who are joining us now out of necessity are where the rest of us were at in 2009-2012.

The world of indie publishing is new and scary to them. There’s a lot more information than there was when many of us started seven to eight years ago, but there’s a lot more misinformation too. And on top of it, the scams have become sophisticated.

It’s harder to tell when someone is a legitimate source of information or offering a legitimate class in modern publishing technology than it was not so long ago. And these people, who have experience in a world no longer available to them, are starting over in a world that looks familiar and isn’t.

In the past week, I’ve had three interactions with writers/publishers who have no idea how their world has changed.

One publisher asked me for the name of a newish professional writer to write work-for-hire for his gaming company. I told him the world was different, and I no longer know young writers who are willing to sell all rights just to get a foot in the door of traditional publishing.

That’s true. I don’t. The writers I know are either making a living as indies or are working at it. None of them want to write work-for-hire and most don’t want to be published traditionally. All of them know they can make more money as an indie than they would ever make in modern traditional publishing.

I ended up recommending two authors to him that this guy already knew. Both writers no longer have traditional publishing careers, but both refuse to learn how to publish indie and so, now, spend all of their time on social media, complaining that they can’t make a living any more.

They can use the money, and he already knows they’re good writers. I doubt they’ll make much, but that pittance will be more than they’re making now.

One writer is putting a toe into the indie waters without doing any research. I fear for him. He asks me the occasional weird question, such as should he pay $500 to take a course in how to use Scrivner. Um, no. I keep pointing him to free sites, my blog, Dean’s blog, publishing podcasts and other places to learn, and he consistently refuses to dig into the reading.

He’d rather take a course from a scam artist. Or, in truth, he’d rather pay someone to publish his book. But he knows that paying $5,000 for one book is not going to allow him to have a career, so he flails.

One writer—well, really, several writers— are coming to our Master Class. They’re aware that the world has changed, and they needs a lot of education on how to publish as a hybrid writer. They’re coming for the information and the networking.

These writers made a good living not too long ago. They’re now in a transition, but at least they know it. And they know how to find the information and the support group that will help them with the transition.

It’s tough enough for those of us who have been indie for years now. Every year, we run a Business Master Class and every year, we throw out 90% of the previous year’s notes. The industry changes that much and that fast. The best thing about the Business Master Class is the networking. We learn a lot while the class goes on, and afterwards, we can ask on the email list if someone has done X, and if it worked. Chances are someone on the list has tried X and has an opinion or a shorthand way of doing things.

We move on and we move forward. The others are stuck.

I remember how overwhelming it was for me to make the transition to mostly indie. I’m not entirely indie. My short fiction is still hybrid, as is all of my work in translation. But I can’t see any situation where I would ever go back to a traditional publisher for my novels. The contracts are awful, the lack of support profound, and the benefits nearly nonexistent.

The traditionally published writers who are being cut loose or who are being offered terrible deals are just beginning to realize this. And they’re at a complete loss as to what to do.

I feel for them. I really do.

I see a lot of nastiness about these traditional writers from indie writers, but the indies don’t understand. The indies believe the traditionally published former bestsellers should know what was going on in the indie world, when there had been no need for these traditional writers to know any of that.

They were writing their books, selling them to traditional publishers the old-fashioned way, and not paying attention to anything except writing.

That’s how traditional writers are trained (and spoon-fed this by agents and publishers who take most of the book’s profit). The traditional writers have been doing what they always did.

Until they were suddenly cut free.

I liken them to Rip Van Winkle. For those of you who aren’t Americans and didn’t have to read this tall tale (written by Washington Irving) in school, Rip Van Winkle was a somewhat shiftless man who liked his drink. He went into the Catskill Mountains one afternoon in 1769 (I think) to avoid his nagging wife.

He has a strange dream about bowling with bearded men (who are always depicted as dwarves) and awakens to find his beard is long and the musket he always carries is rusted.

He wanders out of the mountains into a strange situation. His wife is dead, his children are grown, and the very world has changed under his feet. He’s been asleep for twenty years, and in that time, the American Revolution happened, and the Brits lost.

So instead of King George the III ruling colonies, George Washington is president of the United States of America. Nothing is the same. It seems similar—the town still exists, Rip Van Winkle’s favorite tavern still exists—but all the concerns of the people around him are different. The habits, the way that business is done, are all very, very different.

Traditionally published writers, particularly those who were doing well ten years ago, are Rip Van Winkle. While they were writing their books (in autumn in the Catskills), the entire world shifted underneath them. Because they had followed the rules and had the agents/publishers handle the business, these writers felt no need to keep up—because they never had before.

Now they’re dropped, one by one, into a world as strange to them as the one Rip Van Winkle found himself in. The structures (houses, taverns, churches) look the same, but the way things are done is very, very different. And to make matters worse, it’s not easy to explain how the changes came about.

Most of us lived through those changes, watched the changes day by day, argued about them, figured out how to navigate them, and found the best solutions for us.

These traditionally published writers need to learn everything, from business management to how to publish a quality book to distribution to how to avoid scams.

To make matters worse, no one who has been doing this for a long time wants to explain the beginner stuff. We went through that years ago, and we don’t want to think about it any more.

When I think someone is not serious about learning it, like the publisher who wanted a writer for a work-for-hire, I simply say that I don’t know anyone who could help him any more. I used to, but I don’t any longer.

If some writer whines and tells me that they only want to write and learning the other stuff is too hard, I nod and quietly make a note not to waste much time with them.

However, if a writer truly wants to learn, and continually asks good questions, I’ll help as much as I can. They’re going to have to do the heavy lifting themselves, though—reading blogs, finding the (free) instructions on the web, taking the occasional course from reputable folks.

I’ll steer those writers away from the scams. I’ll make sure they know where to find the tools they need to succeed. That’s partly what this blog does.

It’s been a godsend, really, because before services like that existed…um…just a few years ago, we had to do a lot of the sign-up stuff by hand.

Those are the kind of changes that make all the difference. But they’re small and they’re subtle and they don’t make a lot of sense to someone who is staggering down a mountain with a rusted musket and a beard that grew a foot overnight.

Last year, several writers who were in the Rip Van Winkle phase came to the Business Master Class. One whined loudly about everything he was going to have to do. To be fair, he has always whined loudly about things—and then did them with great dedication and creativity. He did the same thing this past year.

He applied himself to learning the new world of publishing. He took his bestselling series—the one his Big Five publisher stupidly abandoned—and published the next two (I think) books himself. His numbers have remained fairly consistent from traditional publishing to indie. He didn’t lose readers. He gained some.

And something else he gained. He gained almost all of the profits from his own work. He didn’t share it with an agent. And he certainly didn’t get pennies on the dollar from his publisher.

As he delightedly said to me a few months ago, he has had his best financial year ever, and the year isn’t even over yet.

Yep. That’s what writers who overcome their Rip Van Winkle Syndrome can do.

Most traditionally published writers will emulate Rip Van Winkle, though. They’ll hightail it to the local tavern, like he did after his strange experience, drink and complain about what they lost.

The smart ones, though, will learn everything they need to know about this new world and will see the freedom it gives them.

Those of us who have been indie throughout the transition can help the ones who need help, by pointing out the scams, helping them find the right places to learn, and teaching them how the business actually works.

We’re going to encounter a lot of Rip Van Winkles in the next five or so years. Be understanding of them. Be compassionate. They’ve been drinking and bowling in the mountains. They had no idea that dawn would bring a completely different world.

You can’t make them accept that world. But if they want help, provide it. Don’t judge them. It took all of us a while to figure out how to navigate this place.

We were motivated. If they are motivated too, they’ll do well.

We only have to give them a chance.

***

This blog tends to focus on indie and hybrid writing. I’ve watched my own interest in traditional publishing wane as time passes. Which makes this blog less useful for the newly indie writer.

You’d think I’d run out of indie blog topics, but I haven’t. I have a long list of ideas, plus a book to assemble from the previous blogs on branding. I’m finding myself so busy in this indie world that I marvel at it, almost every day.

If you liked this post and want to show your one-time appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you go that route, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you.

]]>http://kriswrites.com/2017/09/06/business-musings-rip-van-winkle-syndrome/feed/1219833http://kriswrites.com/2017/09/06/business-musings-rip-van-winkle-syndrome/The Next Nelscott Bookhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/kriswrites/vIQx/~3/jFfKWxaDaaE/
http://kriswrites.com/2017/09/05/the-next-nelscott-book/#commentsTue, 05 Sep 2017 15:40:44 +0000http://kriswrites.com/?p=19866I’m pleased to announce that A Gym of Her Ownis now available to preorder—at least, the ebook version is. The paper version will appear on the book’s release date, which is October 17.

I’m really excited about this book. It isn’t a Smokey Dalton book, although it takes place in the same time period. If you read the Smokey books, then you’r familiar with one of the main characters, Valentina Wilson. Only she’s different here than she is in Stone Cribs or in the later short stories. Gym takes Val and show us how she went from the victim of a horrible crime in Stone Cribs to the strong woman of the short stories. (Yes, there will be a Val-only novel someday.)

Anyway. Here’s the back cover copy:

A former combat nurse, a former legal secretary, and the owner of one of the first women-only gyms form an unlikely alliance in this fast-paced and riveting new work by the acclaimed historical mystery novelist Kris Nelscott.

The novel opens on the day of the Moon landing, July 20, 1969, two years after the Summer of Love changed Berkeley forever, and left lots of broken teenagers in its wake.

One of the first (if not the first) women-only gyms in the nation and the start of the Women’s Self-Defense Movement bring June “Eagle” Eagleton, Valentina “Val” Wilson, and Pamela “Pammy” Griffin together.

They never intended to face the kidnappings and murders of college students. But no one else paid attention.

An amazing trip into the experiences and lives of 1969 Berkeley told with riveting attention to detail. A read that will keep you turning pages into the late night and shock you at the same time.